Abstract
Emotion regulation is a critical mechanism in the socio-emotional development of children. Previous studies revealed that children use cognitive reappraisal to downregulate negative emotions. Moreover, the amplitude of late positive potential (LPP) shows a more obvious reduction following neutral interpretations than following negative interpretations. However, whether children can use cognitive reappraisal to regulate positive emotions remains unclear. In the present study, 46 8- to 12-year-old children were asked to reappraise the meaning of pleasant pictures. Electroencephalography (EEG) data were collected during the task. As predicted, LPP amplitudes increased more following reappraisal condition than following pleasant condition. The analysis of spatial-temporal shifting patterns showed that the effect occurred in the earlier window for the posterior region. As time progressed, this effect evidenced a trend from posterior region to the central and anterior regions, especially for the younger children. Furthermore, the greater brain activations occurred in left hemisphere when children upregulated positive emotions which partially supported previous research suggesting that increasing positive emotion engaged primarily left-lateralized prefrontal regions. Taken together, the findings suggest that children can use cognitive reappraisal to upregulate positive emotions.
Highlights
Emotion regulation refers to the internal and external processes that individuals conduct to monitor, evaluate, and revise emotional responses (Gross, 1998a)
The present study primarily aims to create a design that would examine whether children could use cognitive reappraisal to upregulate positive emotions, with late positive potential (LPP) serving as an effective neural marker
To examine the time course of the LPP throughout the experiment and the brain regions where LPP occurred during emotion regulation, we identified three time windows, three regions and two hemispheres
Summary
Emotion regulation refers to the internal and external processes that individuals conduct to monitor, evaluate, and revise emotional responses (Gross, 1998a). Emotion regulation plays an important role in the socio-emotional development of children (Cole et al, 2004). Emotion regulation is closely linked to academic performance, and successful emotion regulation is a potential predictor of positive emotional development in the future (Gross and John, 2003; Tugade and Fredrickson, 2007; Mega et al, 2014). Emotion regulation can be manifested in various forms, and most emotion regulation efforts aim to decrease negative emotions and enhance positive emotions for good mental health (Aldao et al, 2010; Gross, 2013)
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