The Down-regulation Effect Of Implementation Intention On The Anticipatory Anxiety

Emotional expectation can make people adapt to the environment better.It is very important for us.However,it can activate the neural circuits related to emotion,and keep the alertness to the subsequent emotional goals,which can not be ignored.Research shows that the antecedent anticipation of negative events can itself lead to obvious subjective anxiety experience.We often have the experience in our life that when the exam is near or we are about to perform on stage,we will feel the heart beating faster,nervous and anxious,which is anticipatory anxiety.In addition,because of the excessive negative expectation for future events,anxious individuals are accompanied by persistent anticipatory anxiety.Therefore,how to reduce the anxiety experience caused by the antecedent anticipation,so that human beings can better cope with the potential threats and adapt to the environment,which has become an important problem to be solved in the field of emotion regulation.Implementation intention adds specific strategy on the basis of goal intention(For example,“I will not feel anxious”)and forms an automatic connection between the specified cue scenario and response through "if-then" contingency(For example,“I will not feel anxious.If the cue prompts negative pictures may appear,I will remain calm and relaxed after seeing the cue”).As a way of transforming conscious goal pursuit into automatic goal pursuit,implementation intention can not only save cognitive resources,but also effectively regulate emotion by connecting cues and goals.A large number of studies have revealed the effectiveness of implementation intention on emotion regulation.Therefore,this study explored whether implementation intention could effectively regulate the anticipatory anxiety of normal individuals and anxious individuals as well as other negative emotions,and improved the emotional state of individuals after negative events.In Experiment 1,the recruited subjects were randomly divided into control group(natural expression of emotion),goal intention group(“I will not feel anxious”),goal intention + strategy group(“I will not feel anxious,I will keep calm and relaxed”)and implementation intention group(“I will not feel anxious.If the cue prompts negative pictures may appear,I will remain calm and relaxed after seeing the cue”).The cue-target paradigm was used to induce the individual's anticipatory anxiety.Subjective anxiety score was used to characterize the emotional state of the subjects.This study explored the moderating effect of implementation intention on anticipatory anxiety.The results showed that negative cues induced higher level of anticipatory anxiety than uncertain cues,and uncertain cues also elicited higher anticipatory anxiety than neutral cues.This indicated that the experimental procedure of this study effectively induced the anticipatory anxiety.Importantly,for negative and uncertain cues,the anxiety score of the implementation intention group was significantly lower than that of the control group,but there were no significant differences in anxiety score between the goal intention group,the goal intention + strategy group and the control group.This shows that only the implementation intention group can effectively reduce the individual's anticipatory anxiety,but goal intention group and goal intention + strategy group had no such effect.The core feature of anxious individuals is the excessive negative expectation for uncertain events in the future.They overestimate the probability of negative events,resulting in strong anticipatory anxiety.Therefore,in Experiment 2,based on Experiment 1,we further explore whether implementation intention can effectively regulate the anticipatory anxiety of anxious individuals.Based on the results of Experiment 1,in Experiment 2,SAS was used to screen anxious and non-anxious population,and the selected subjects with high or low anxiety levels were classified into implementation intention group and control group randomly.The cue-target paradigm was used to induce the individual's anticipatory anxiety.Subjective anxiety score was used to characterize the emotional state of the subjects.This study explored whether implementation intention could effectively regulate the anticipatory anxiety of anxious individuals.The experimental procedure was basically the same as that in experiment 1,except that emotional valence and arousal ratings for the target pictures were required,in order to further explored whether implementation intention could improve the emotional state of individuals after negative events.The results showed implementation intention could effectively reduce individual's anticipatory anxiety,irrespective of anxious or non-anxious population.In the target presentation stage,current study found the emotional valence and arousal score of the non-anxious population were not affected by cue certainty(certain cues and uncertain cues),only related to picture type(negative pictures and neutral pictures);while those of the anxious population were not influenced by picture type,only related to cue certainty.Despite their different characteristics,implementation intention could effectively improve emotional state of anxious and non-anxious population.For non-anxious people,implementation intention affected their emotional valence and arousal,improving their emotional valence score of negative pictures and reducing their emotional arousal score of those;for anxious people,implementation intention only influenced their emotional arousal,reducing their emotional arousal score.Previous studies have shown that implementation intention could effectively regulate different forms of anxiety,such as social anxiety,generalized anxiety and event-specific anxiety.This study proves for the first time that implementation intention has down-regulation effect on anticipatory anxiety,which is not only applicable to normal individuals,but also to anxious individuals.And implementation intention can improve the emotional state of individuals after negative events.While anxious individuals exhibit strong anticipatory anxiety due to excessive negative expectation,and always adopt maladaptive emotional coping styles such as worry and avoidance,which can damage their physical and mental health,and even cause emotional disorders.Therefore,we consider using the regulation method of implementation intention to conduct prior cognitive training(namely training subjects to use adaptive cognitive styles in the anticipation stage)for anxious individuals,so as to reduce their anticipatory anxiety.With the reduction of anticipatory anxiety,the excessive negative expectation of individuals will gradually weaken or even eliminate,and finally complete the effective intervention for anxious individuals.It may be a crucial way to improve the clinical intervention effect of cognitive training.This is also the practical significance of this study.In addition,existing researches about cognitive training for anxious individuals mainly focused on post cognitive training,for example,distraction(training subjects to change their attention bias after emotional events)and cognitive reappraisal(training subjects to change their cognitive style after emotional events).Few studies have focused on prior cognitive training.This study provides supporting evidence for the field of prior cognitive training.