Abstract
Little is known about the potentially powerful set of emotion regulation (ER) processes that target emotion-eliciting situations. We thus studied the decision to end emotion-eliciting situations in the laboratory. We hypothesized that people would try to end negative situations more frequently than neutral situations to regulate distress. In addition, motivated by the selection, optimization, and compensation with ER framework, we hypothesized that failed attempts to end the situation would prompt either (a) greater negative emotion or (b) compensatory use of a different ER process, attentional deployment (AD). Fifty-eight participants (18–26 years old, 67% women) viewed negative and neutral pictures and pressed a key whenever they wished to stop viewing them. After key press, the picture disappeared (“success”) or stayed (“failure”) on screen. To index emotion, we measured corrugator and electrodermal activity, heart rate, and self-reported arousal. To index overt AD, we measured eye gaze. As their reason for ending the situation, participants more frequently reported being upset by high- than low-arousal negative pictures; they more frequently reported being bored by low- than high-arousal neutral pictures. Nevertheless, participants’ negative emotional responding did not increase in the context of ER failure nor did they use overt AD as a compensatory ER strategy. We conclude that situation-targeted ER processes are used to regulate emotional responses to high-arousal negative and low-arousal neutral situations; ER processes other than overt AD may be used to compensate for ER failure in this context.
Highlights
Emotional responses are often useful in our everyday life, but can, depending on the context, be inappropriate
This idea would be confirmed by finding higher self-reported arousal, corrugator activity, Electrodermal activity (EDA), or greater deceleration in heart rate (HR) during the 12-s time period after picture onset on negative trials relative to the neutral ones
EDA activity was greater for negative pictures (M = 0.07, SD = 0.14) than neutral pictures (M = 0.04, SD = 0.16), t(57) = 1.93, p = 0.058, dz = 0.19, a difference that was on the border of significance
Summary
Emotional responses are often useful in our everyday life, but can, depending on the context, be inappropriate. In order to meet your goal for this situation (getting healthy), you reduce your distress during the procedure by staying in the room, taking a couple of deep breaths, distracting yourself by counting floor tiles, reminding yourself that the outcome is worth it, holding the hand of your significant other, or all of the above This is just an illustration of when and how we routinely regulate our emotions based on the context we are in (Gross et al, 2006). We can attend to different aspects of the situation (“attentional deployment”), reappraise it (i.e., generate a new meaning; “cognitive change”), and/or directly alter our experiential, expressive, or bodily response to the situation (“response modulation”) The latter three ER families target the attention, appraisal, and multisystem response components of the emotion generative cycle, respectively
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