| The focus of this investigation was the selectivity of the process of emotion regulation. Specifically, the effects of suppressing the experience of negative emotion on subsequent positive experiences were studied using a convenience sample of 134 adults, aged 18 to 71 years. Emotion regulation was investigated using the affective modulation of startle paradigm in which participants are shown emotion-evoking images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1999), with startle-eliciting probes presented during image viewing. In this paradigm, participants typically exhibit startle potentiation when viewing images that elicit negative emotions and startle inhibition when viewing images that elicit positive emotions. It was hypothesized that participants who were instructed to suppress the experience of negative emotion would show less startle potentiation when viewing negative images than when instructed to respond naturally. It was also hypothesized that the effects of suppressing the experience of emotion would generalize to the experience of positive emotion, such that participants instructed to suppress the experience of negative emotion would exhibit less startle inhibition when viewing pleasant images than when instructed to respond naturally. Finally, the effects of two individual differences, extraversion and emotional inhibition, on the generalization of negative emotion to positive emotion, above and beyond the effects of the experimental manipulation, were examined. Results supported the first hypothesis for both startle eyeblink magnitude and amplitude. However, suppression of the experience of negative emotion did not generalize to subsequent positive emotion. Neither extraversion nor emotional inhibition influenced the generalization of the suppression of the experience of negative emotion to positive emotion. Overall, the results provide evidence for selectivity in emotion regulation. However, further research is needed to examine the generality of this finding across varied valence and arousal levels of emotion-evoking stimuli. |
