Differentiating electrophysiological response to decrease and increase negative emotion regulation

Research on the cognitive neural mechanism of privacy empowerment illusion cues regarding comprehensibility and interpretability for privacy disclosures

In the era of artificial intelligence, privacy empowerment illusion has become a crucial means for digital enterprises and platforms to "manipulate" users and create an illusion of control. This topic has also become an urgent and pressing concern for current research. However, the existing studies are limited in terms of their perspectives and methodologies, making it challenging to fully explain why users express concerns about privacy empowerment illusion but repeatedly disclose their personal information. This study combines the associative-propositional evaluation model (APE) and cognitive load theory, using event-related potential (ERP) technology to investigate the underlying mechanisms of how the comprehensibility and interpretability of privacy empowerment illusion cues affect users' immediate attitudes and privacy disclosure behaviours; these mechanisms are mediated by psychological processing and cognitive load differences. Behavioural research results indicate that in the context of privacy empowerment illusion cues with low comprehensibility, users are more inclined to disclose their private information when faced with high interpretability than they are when faced with low interpretability. EEG results show that in the context of privacy empowerment illusion cues with low comprehensibility, high interpretability induces greater P2 amplitudes than does low interpretability; low interpretability induces greater N2 amplitudes than does high interpretability. This study extends the scopes of the APE model and cognitive load theory in the field of privacy research, providing new insights into privacy attitudes. Doing so offers a valuable framework through which digital enterprises can gain a deeper understanding of users' genuine privacy attitudes and immediate reactions under privacy empowerment illusion situations. This understanding can help increase user privacy protection and improve their overall online experience, making it highly relevant and beneficial.

How do fundamental emotion beliefs affect the rapid emotional processing? An ERP study

Beliefs about whether emotions are good or bad, controllable or uncontrollable are two fundamental emotion beliefs. Studies have confirmed the link between the two beliefs and emotional responses, but how emotion beliefs affect the process from emotional stimulus perception to emotion generation and automatic regulation is unclear. Answering this question helps to understand the role of emotion beliefs in emotional dysfunction and dysregulation and can provide a basis for effective emotion regulation. Therefore, the current study used event-related potential (ERP) measures to examine the time course and neural mechanisms by which emotional beliefs influence the processing of emotional pictures. One hundred participants were divided into four groups (25 per group) according to controllable or uncontrollable beliefs about emotions and good or bad beliefs about negative emotions, and viewed emotional negative and neutral pictures. Results showed that P2 was more positive in participants with emotion controllable vs. uncontrollable belief. The early posterior negativity (EPN) was more negative for unpleasant than neutral images in participants with emotion good and controllable beliefs as well as with bad and uncontrollable beliefs. On late positive potential (LPP), middle LPP (500-1000ms) was more positive in emotion good vs. bad belief holders and the late LPP (1000-2000 ms) was more positive for negative than neutral images in emotion uncontrollable belief holders. The findings suggest that fundamental emotion beliefs can affect individuals' early attention and late meaning evaluation towards unpleasant stimuli. Furthermore, they provide insight into altered beliefs about emotion in people with emotion dysfunction or dysregulation.

The effect of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression on sadness and the recognition of sad scenes: An event-related potential study

Previous studies have found differences in the cognitive and neural mechanisms between cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression in the regulation of various negative emotions and the recognition of regulated stimuli. However, whether these differences are valid for sadness remains unclear. As such, we investigated the effect of cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression on sadness regulation and the recognition of sad scenes adopting event-related potentials (ERPs). Twenty-eight healthy undergraduate and graduate students took part in this study. In the regulation phase, the participants were asked to down-regulation, expressive suppression, or maintain their sad emotion evoked by the sad images, and then to perform an immediately unexpected recognition task involving the regulated images. The behavioral results show that down-regulation reappraisal significantly diminished subjective feelings of sadness, but expressive suppression did not; both strategies impaired the participants' recognition of sad images, and expressive suppression had a greater damaging effect on the recognition of sad images than down-regulation reappraisal. The ERP results indicate that reappraisal (from 300 ms to 1,500 ms after image onset) and expressive suppression (during 300-600 ms) significantly reduced the late positive potential (LPP) induced by sadness. These findings suggest that down-regulation reappraisal and expression suppression can effectively decrease sadness, and that down-regulation reappraisal (relative to expression suppression) is a more effective regulation strategy for sadness. Both strategies impair the recognition of sad scenes, and expression suppression (compared to down-regulation reappraisal) leads to relatively greater impairment in the recognition of sad scenes.

Emotion regulation strategies differentially modulate neural activity across affective prediction stages: An HD-EEG investigation

Emotion regulation (ER) strategies can influence how affective predictions are constructed by the brain (generation stage) to prearrange action (implementation stage) and update internal models according to incoming stimuli (updating stage). However, neurocomputational mechanisms by which this is achieved are unclear. We investigated through high-density EEG if different ER strategies (expressive suppression vs. cognitive reappraisal) predicted event-related potentials (ERPs) and brain source activity across affective prediction stages, as a function of contextual uncertainty. An S1-S2 paradigm with emotional faces and pictures as S1s and S2s was presented to 36 undergraduates. Contextual uncertainty was manipulated across three blocks with 100, 75, or 50% S1-S2 affective congruency. The effects of ER strategies, as assessed through the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, on ERP and brain source activity were tested for each prediction stage through linear mixed-effects models. No ER strategy affected prediction generation. During implementation, in the 75% block, a higher tendency to suppress emotions predicted higher activity in the left supplementary motor area at 1,500–2,000 ms post-stimulus, and smaller amplitude of the Contingent Negative Variation at 2,000–2,500 ms. During updating, in the 75% block, a higher tendency to cognitively reappraise emotions predicted larger P2, Late Positive Potential, and right orbitofrontal cortex activity. These results suggest that both ER strategies interact with the levels of contextual uncertainty by differently modulating ERPs and source activity, and that different strategies are deployed in a moderately predictive context, supporting the efficient updating of affective predictive models only in the context in which model updating occurs.

Trait boldness and emotion regulation: An event-related potential investigation

The present study sought to extend knowledge of the role of boldness, a transdiagnostic bipolar trait dimension involving low sensitivity to threat, in emotional reactivity and regulation using physiological and report-based measures. One prior study found that boldness was associated with reduced late positive potential (LPP) while passively viewing aversive images, but not during emotion regulation; a disconnect between LPP and self-reported reactivity was also observed. Here, participants (N = 63) completed an emotion regulation task in which they either passively viewed or effortfully up- or downregulated their emotional reactivity to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures while EEG activity was recorded; they later retrospectively rated the success of their regulation efforts. ANOVAs examining the interactive effects of regulation instruction and boldness on LPP amplitude revealed that lower boldness (higher trait fearfulness) was associated with paradoxical increases in LPP to threat photos during instructed downregulation, relative to passive viewing, along with lower reported regulation success on these trials. Unexpectedly, similar LPP effects were observed for affective images overall, and especially nurturance photos. Although subject to certain limitations, these results suggest that individual differences in boldness play a role not only in general reactivity to aversive stimuli, as evidenced by prior work, but in the ability to effortfully downregulate emotional response.

EEG microstate analysis of emotion regulation reveals no sequential processing of valence and emotional arousal

In electroencephalography (EEG), microstates are distributions of activity across the scalp that persist for several tens of milliseconds before changing into a different pattern. Microstate analysis is a way of utilizing EEG as both temporal and spatial imaging tool, but has rarely been applied to task-based data. This study aimed to conceptually replicate microstate findings of valence and emotional arousal processing and investigate the effects of emotion regulation on microstates, using data of an EEG paradigm with 107 healthy adults who actively viewed emotional pictures, cognitively detached from them, or suppressed facial reactions. Within the first 600 ms after stimulus onset only the comparison of viewing positive and negative pictures yielded significant results, caused by different electrodes depending on the microstate. Since the microstates associated with more and less emotionally arousing pictures did not differ, sequential processing could not be replicated. When extending the analysis to 2000 ms after stimulus onset, differences were exclusive to the comparison of viewing and detaching from negative pictures. Intriguingly, we observed the novel phenomenon of a microstate difference that could not be attributed to single electrodes. This suggests that microstate analysis can detect differences beyond those detected by event-related potential analysis.

Is reappraisal always effective in modifying emotional reactions in females? The role of regulatory timing and goals

Introduction

Numerous studies have explored the effect of cognitive reappraisal before or after emotion-inducing events. However, only a few studies have examined the influence of regulatory timing on the effectiveness of reappraisal. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the role of regulatory timing and goals in reappraisal regulation, which would help promote the specific application of cognitive reappraisal in emotion regulation. We hypothesized that decrease reappraisal would be more effective when initiated early rather than late, but increase reappraisal would be more effective when initiated in the emotional high-activation phase.

Methods

This study, via event-related potential (ERP) technique, probed the influence of the timing and regulatory goal on negative emotion when reappraisal was introduced, respectively 500 ms before (anticipatory), 2,000 ms after (online 2,000 ms) picture onset (in Experiment 1), 500 ms after (online 500 ms) picture onset, and 1,500 ms after (online 1,500 ms) picture onset (in Experiment 2).

Results

Based on the ERP results, under the anticipatory regulation condition, the LPP amplitude in the parietal area was significantly reduced by decrease reappraisal during 700-2,100 ms after picture onset, and under the online 500 ms regulation condition, the LPP in central and parietal areas was significantly enhanced by increase reappraisal during 450-750 ms after regulatory cue onset. Moreover, our results showed that increase reappraisal evoked a larger prefrontal or frontal LPP than decrease reappraisal beginning at about 700 ms after picture onset under the anticipatory regulation condition and beginning at 450 ms after regulatory cue onset under the online 500 ms regulation condition, which may reflect increased cognitive effort and mental conflict associated with increase reappraisal.

Conclusion

The anticipatory reappraisal successfully decreased negative emotion, and online 500 ms reappraisal successfully increased negative emotion. Our results support the hypothesis.

Self-Report and Brain Indicators of Impaired Emotion Regulation in the Broad Autism Spectrum

Although not used as a diagnostic criterion, impaired emotion regulation is frequently observed in autism. The present study examined self-reported use of emotion regulation strategies in individuals scoring low or high on autistic traits. In addition, the late positive potential, which is sensitive to emotional arousal, was used to examine the effect of one strategy, reappraisal. Reporting more autistic traits was related to using more maladaptive and fewer adaptive emotion regulation strategies. Across both groups, no attenuation of the late positive potential during downregulation of unpleasant pictures was found, possibly because of the used valence-changing reappraisal operationalisation. Hence, although self-report indicated impaired emotion regulation in individuals high on autistic traits, electrophysiological findings could not confirm this.