The Influence Of Existing And Unconscious Emotion Regulation Strategies On The Attentional Bias Of Negative Information

In a negative emotional state,individuals often show a tendency to pay attention to negative information,which in turn will maintain or even enhance the individual's negative emotions,thereby causing a vicious circle.Previous studies have shown that emotion regulation can affect individuals' negative information attention bias,but few studies have compared the effects of different emotion regulation strategies at the same time.According to the process model of emotion regulation,cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression have different regulation effects on the emotional response.Thus,one may ask whether there are also differences in the effects of these two emotion regulation strategies on negative information attention bias.Besides,conscious emotion regulation consumes cognitive resources,which are also an important influencing factors on attention bias.Unconscious emotion regulation does not require conscious participation,has the advantage of less or no consumption of cognitive resources,thus may be better to reduce negative information attention bias.Therefore,this research examined the effects of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression on negative information attention bias at the conscious and unconscious levels when in the negative emotional state through two experiments.Experiment 1 used a mixed experiment design of 3(group: conscious cognitive reappraisal,conscious expression suppression,control group)× 2(consistency: consistent,inconsistent)to examine the effects of conscious cognitive reappraisal and conscious expression suppression on negative information attention bias.Results showed that conscious cognitive reappraisal group reported significantly higher emotional experiences than the control group and conscious expression suppression group,and there was no significant difference between the emotional experiences of the control group and conscious expression suppression group.In the probe dot task,the main effect of consistency was significant,the reaction time under consistent conditions was significantly less than inconsistent conditions.Moreover,the attention bias score of the control group was significantly greater than 0,while the attention bias score of the conscious cognitive reappraisal group and the conscious expression suppression group was not significantly different from 0.Experiment 2 used a mixed experimental design of 3(group: unconscious cognitive reappraisal,unconscious expression suppression,control group)× 2(consistency: consistent,inconsistent)to examine the effects of unconscious cognitive reappraisal and unconscious expression suppression on negative information attention bias.Results showed that emotionexperience of three groups was not significantly different.In the probe dot task,the interaction of group and consistency was significantly different.The simple effect analysis found that the inconsistent reaction time of the unconscious cognitive reappraisal group and the unconscious expression suppression group was significantly smaller than that of the consistent reaction time.However,the inconsistent reaction time of the control group was significantly longer than that of the consistent reaction time.The attention bias score of the control group was significantly greater than 0,while the attention bias score of the unconscious cognitive reappraisal group and unconscious expression suppression group was significantly less than 0.Combining the two experiments,this research drawn the following conclusions:(1)Both cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression can reduce attention bias to negative information,and the two strategies have no significant difference.(2)Both conscious emotion regulation and unconscious emotion regulation can reduce the attention bias to negative information.Among them,there has no significant difference between participants' attention to positive and negative pictures under the condition of conscious emotion regulation,while the unconscious emotion regulation promote participants to avoid the negative information.This suggests that unconscious emotion regulation may have a better effect on reducing the negative information attention bias.