Abstract
Though the spontaneous emotion regulation has received long discussions, few studies have explored the regulatory effects of spontaneous expressive suppression in neural activations, especially in collectivistic cultural context. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed to examine whether individual differences in the tendency to use suppression are correlated with amygdala responses to negative situations when individuals are unconsciously primed with expressive suppression. Twenty-three healthy Chinese undergraduates completed an fMRI paradigm involving fear processing, and a synonym matching task was added to prime participants with the unconscious (automatic) expressive suppression goal. Participants completed measures of typical emotion regulation use (reappraisal and suppression), trait anxiety, and neuroticism. Results indicated that only in emotion suppression prime condition, greater use of suppression in everyday life was related to decreased amygdala activity. These associations were not attributable to variation in trait anxiety, neuroticism, or the habitual use of reappraisal. These findings suggest that in collectivistic cultural settings, individual differences in expressive suppression do not alter fear-related neural activation during suppression-irrelevant context. However, unconscious suppression priming facilitates the manifestation of individual differences in the neural consequence of expressive suppression, as reflected by the priming-specific decrease of emotional subcortical activations with more use of expressive suppression.
Highlights
It is widely acknowledged that individuals differ systematically in their habitual use of emotion regulation strategies (Gross and John, 2003; John and Gross, 2004)
A previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study has reported that individuals with higher self-reported reappraisal scores showed lesser activation in both the left and right amygdala, suggesting that the individual differences in the implicit processing of emotion may be reflected on bilateral amygdala (Drabant et al, 2009)
We examined whether after activating suppression goal, individual differences in the tendency to use suppression would manifest in decreased amygdala responses
Summary
It is widely acknowledged that individuals differ systematically in their habitual use of emotion regulation strategies (Gross and John, 2003; John and Gross, 2004). Gross and John (2003) developed reliable brief trait measures of suppression and reappraisal They found that in terms of relationships with other variables, the pattern of results is similar to that reported for the experimental approach: the habitual use of reappraisal was associated with less negative affect, better interpersonal functioning, and well-being. Egloff et al (2006) examined the associations of spontaneous emotion regulation with experiential and physiological emotion responding during evaluated speaking tasks The pattern of their results was similar to that reported for the experimental approach: suppression was associated with less anxiety expression, greater physiological responding, reduced memory for the speech but had no impact on negative affect. An functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study confirmed that participants with higher reported use of reappraisal were more likely to engage in spontaneous reappraisal, and showed decreased amygdala activity during the processing of emotionally negative facial expressions (Drabant et al, 2009)
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