Abstract
Previous studies indicate that emotion regulation may occur unconsciously, without the cost of cognitive efforts; and that conscious acceptance effectively reduces the emotional consequences of negative events. However, it has yet to be determined how conscious and unconscious acceptance strategies differ in behavioral and physiological consequences of emotion regulation. As unconscious regulation occurs with little cost of cognitive resources, the current study hypothesizes that unconscious acceptance regulates the emotional consequence of negative events more effectively compared to conscious acceptance. Subjects were randomly assigned to conscious acceptance, unconscious acceptance and control conditions. A frustrating arithmetic task was used to induce negative emotion. Emotional experiences were assessed by the positive affect and negative affect scale (PANAS) while emotion-related physiological activation was assessed by the heart-rate reactivity. The results showed that unconscious acceptance produced less reductions of positive affect ratings compared to conscious acceptance during frustration. In addition, both conscious and unconscious acceptance strategies significantly decreased emotion-related heart-rate activity (to a similar extent) in comparison with the control condition. Moreover, heart-rate reactivity showed a trend of positive correlation with negative affect rating and a trend of negative correlation with positive affect rating during frustration compared to baseline phases. Thus, unconscious acceptance is not only able to decrease emotion-related physiological activity, but also able to produce better emotional experiences compared to conscious acceptance. This suggests that it is practically important to consider unconscious acceptance for emotion regulation in real-life settings.
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