Abstract
Cognitive emotion regulation strategies are considered the king’s highway to control affective reactions. Two broad categories of cognitive regulation are attentional deployment and semantic meaning. The basic distinctive feature between these categories is the type of conflict between regulatory and emotional processes for dominance, with an early attentional selection conflict in attentional deployment and a late appraisal selection conflict in semantic meaning. However, prior studies that tested the relative efficacy of these two regulatory categories varied the type and the degree of conflict. Our major goal was to test the relative efficacy of a novel attentional deployment strategy (visual search distraction) and a classic semantic meaning strategy (reappraisal) that have a different type of conflict but a matched degree of conflict. Specifically, visual search distraction involves a strong degree of attentional selection conflict manifested in attending subtle non-emotional features that are camouflaged within potent negative emotional stimuli. Reappraisal involves a strong degree of appraisal selection conflict manifested in construing neutral reappraisals that rely on potent negative emotional appraisals. Based on our theoretical model we hypothesized and found that visual search distraction was as effective as cognitive reappraisal in down-regulating the experience of low intensity of negative emotion (Study 1), but more effective, less effortful, and more strongly blocking emotional information processing than cognitive reappraisal when regulating high intensity (Study 2). A final study ruled out a demand characteristics explanation by showing that participants’ expectations about how they should feel diverged from how they actually reported feeling following regulation (Study 3). Our findings suggest that the basic difference in the type rather than degree of conflict between attentional deployment and semantic meaning determines strategies’ outcome.
Highlights
One of the fundamental questions that attracted early philosophers as well as modern psychologists is how the mind or reason can control basic drives or emotions
These results provide complementary evidence to those obtained with negativity ratings in showing that visual search distraction required less cognitive effort than reappraisal for high intensity stimuli
The major goal of the present study was to test the relative efficacy of a novel attentional deployment sub-strategy that has a matched degree of conflict with a classic semantic meaning sub-strategy under low and high negative intensities
Summary
One of the fundamental questions that attracted early philosophers as well as modern psychologists is how the mind or reason can control basic drives or emotions. Aristotle’s postulation regarding the powerful connection between one’s cognition and subsequent emotional experience has clearly influenced modern theorem in what has become the field of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998a,b, 2013; Koole, 2009; Webb et al, 2012 for reviews). According to several conceptual accounts, cognitive emotion regulation involves recruiting deliberate executive control processes that can change emotions at two major stages of information processing – attentional deployment and semantic meaning (e.g., Ochsner and Gross, 2005; Kalisch et al, 2006; Gross and Thompson, 2007; Sheppes and Gross, 2011, 2012; Suri et al, 2013 for reviews). The existence of overlapping sub-categories, raise important questions about relative efficacy and about the validity of the basic distinction between attentional deployment and semantic meaning
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