Differential Effects Of Self-focused And Situation-focused Reappraisal Based On Implementation Intention

In daily life,people will inevitably encounter a variety of good or bad events,which lead to a variety of corresponding positive or negative emotional experience.Notably,positive or negative emotions affect subsequent memory tasks and behavioral performance.At this time,appropriate emotional regulation can promote subsequent learning and memory,whereas adverse emotion regulation could impair memory.Therefore,it is necessary to adopt appropriate emotional regulation in the daily life.In the field of emotion regulation,most studies used to compare reappraisal to another common strategy,and found that cognitive reappraisal is an adaptive emotion regulation strategy.Notably,there are different types of reappraisal strategies.However,these different types of reappraisal regulation effect are not clear.Cognitive reappraisal can be divided into situation-focused(positive)and self-focused reappraisal(detachment).Previous studies have found that the emotion regulation effect of conscious situation-focused reappraisal is better than that of conscious self-focused reappraisal,which also shows the same results in subsequent memory.A series of studies demonstrated that when intentional emotion regulation is adopted to reduce negative emotion,subjective efforts or cognitive resources are needed.For example,studies have consistently shown that when negative emotions are suppressed intentionally,sympathetic physiological activation were enhanced,which may impair social and cognitive functions and even affect physical health.However,automatic emotional regulation is effective in regulating emotion without taxing cognitive resources.Therefore,automatic emotion regulation has its own advantages.There are no studies comparing automatic self-focused reappraisal with automatic situation-focused reappraisal.Therefore,the experiment 1 attempts to explore the emotional regulation effects of automatic self-focused reappraisal and automatic situation-focused reappraisal,as well as their effects on subsequent memory,from the behavioral level.On the basis of experiment 1,experiment 2 intends to explore the regulating effect of automatic self-focused reappraisal and situation focused reappraisal on emotion and the consumption of cognitive resources on the neurophysiological level through ERP technology.In the first study,the effects of automatic reappraisal strategy on disgusting emotion and memory were investigated.Fifty-one students from southwest university participated in this experiment(50 subjects valid).During the experiment,subjects were instructed to perform three tasks: viewing,automatic self-focused and situational focused reappraisal.Under the condition of viewing,subjects were instructed to watch the pictures carefully.Under the condition of automatic self-focused and situational-focused reappraisal,the corresponding strategies were first started by automatic training.After the completion of the training,the negative pictures were viewed,and the subjective were asked to rate their emotional experience of the picture-attending task.Subsequently,subject needs to perform a continuous recognition Task,with the recognition index as an indicator.The results showed that(1)the unpleasant rating score for automatic self-focused condition was lower than the scores for the viewing and automatic situation-focused conditions,while the emotion rating score during the viewing did not significantly differ from that for the situation-focused condition.(2)The effort and difficulty rating score for automatic self-focused condition were lower than the scores for viewing and automatic situation-focused conditions,while the effort and difficulty rating score during the viewing condition did not significantly differ from that for the automatic situation-focused condition.(3)In terms of the effect of subsequent memory,the memory effect for automatic self-focused reappraisal condition was higher than the memory effect for the viewing and automatic situation-focused conditions,while the memory effect during the viewing did not significantly differ from that for the automatic situation-focused condition.This suggests that automatic self-focused reappraisal can effectively regulate individual subjective emotional experience and consume fewer cognitive resources than automatic situational-focused reappraisal and viewing.Since individuals consume fewer cognitive resources in the process of emotional regulation under automatic self-focused reappraisal condition,this less resource depletion may also lead to better memory effect.In the second study,the effects of automatic reappraisal strategy on the regulation of disgust emotion and the consumption of cognitive resources were investigated.Twenty-six students in southwest university participated in this experiment(23 subjects valid).During the experiment,the subjects needed to carry out the corresponding implementation intention to train the reappraisal strategy,and at the same time,the ERP data and subjective emotion score of the subjects were recorded.The behavioral results showed that(1)the unpleasant rating score for the automatic self-focused condition was lower than the scores for the viewing and automatic situation-focused conditions,while the emotion rating score during the viewing did not significantly differ from that for the automatic situation-focused condition.(2)The effort and difficulty rating score showed no significant difference between the three strategies.The EEG results showed that(1)the frontal LPP difference between negative and neutral pictures was smaller during automatic self-focused than during automatic situation-focused and viewing conditions.However,the magnitude of this difference was similar during viewing and automatic situation-focused reappraisal.The amplitude of frontal LPP is related to executive control and cognitive resource consumption.This suggest that the initiation of automatic self-focused reappraisal consumes less cognitive resources than automatic situation-focused reappraisal;(2)The difference in parietal LPP amplitudes between the conditions involving negative and neutral pictures was larger during the viewing and the automatic situation-focused condition than during the automatic self-focused condition.However,the difference in parietal LPP amplitudes between the conditions involving negative and neutral pictures was similar during the viewing and situation-focused condition.The parietal LPP amplitude is an ERP component related to emotional experience.This suggest that automatic self-focused reappraisal reduces the intensity of unpleasant emotional reactions more effectively than automatic situation-focused reappraisal.The above results show that the use of automatic self-focused reappraisal for emotional regulation can not only effectively regulate individual subjective emotional experience,but also reduce the consumption of cognitive resources,which promotes subsequent memory.This result further suggest that automatic self-focused reappraisal strategy may be a more appropriate way to regulate emotions than automatic situational focused reappraisal.In addition,this study takes memory task as another index to measure cognitive resources,expanding the research scope of automatic emotion regulation on cognitive resource consumption.At the same time,it further emphasizes the application value and significance of automatic emotion regulation in the field of emotion regulation.