Abstract
Individuals frequently generate emotion during the anticipation process and the anticipatory emotion has an important adaptive significance, especially the negative anticipative emotion. Many researches used conscious emotion regulation strategy and successfully reduced negative anticipatory emotion. However, it is costly for our limited cognition. In the present study, we used sentence unscrambling tasks to prime unconscious emotion control goal and investigated its effect on anticipatory anxiety, including experience and physiological activity. The results showed that 1) relative to anticipating neutral images, participations’ anxiety experience and skin conductance level were higher when anticipating negative and unknown images; 2) participants who had a unconscious emotion control goal primed achieved the same decrease in skin conductance as those explicitly instructed to reappraise, compared to a control group; 3) heart rate was not affected by experiment condition and anticipation type. Together, these findings suggest that unconscious emotion regulation may provide an effective mean of regulating negative anticipatory emotion.
Highlights
The results showed that 1) relative to anticipating neutral images, participations’ anxiety experience and skin conductance level were higher when anticipating negative and unknown images; 2) participants who had a unconscious emotion control goal primed achieved the same decrease in skin conductance as those explicitly instructed to reappraise, compared to a control group; 3) heart rate was not affected by experiment condition and anticipation type
The results showed that individuals with high suppression scores decreased activation of the orbital medial prefrontal cortex (OMFC), which could indicate a lack of antecedent emotion regulation, when expecting negative pictures
There was a significantly main effect for experiment condition, F (2, 70) = 3.11, p = 0.05, η2 = 0.08, and the post-hoc revealed that the skin conductance level process value of unconscious emotion control goal condition and conscious emotion regulation condition was lower than control condition while there was no difference between unconscious emotion control goal condition and conscious emotion regulation condition (p > 0.05)
Summary
Researches indicated that anticipatory emotion had influences on our cognitive processes, decision-making, and physical-mental health [2] [3] [4]. Insufficient or excessive anticipatory emotion would lead to mental illness; for instance, there were characteristics of excessive negative anticipatory emotion or lack of positive anticipatory emotion among patients with anxiety disorder, depression disorder, or psychosis [5] [6] [7] [8]. People often attempt to regulate distressing anticipatory emotional states, such as anticipatory anxiety. Most researchers focused on the cognitive processes of anticipation while there was little research paid attention to the anticipatory emotion and its regulation [9] [10] [11]
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