Emotion regulation strategy of self-focused and situation-focused reappraisal and their impact on subsequent cognitive control

Abstract

It is important to explore the relationship between emotional regulation and cognitive control for a better understanding of diseases involving emotional control failure. Cognitive reappraisal is the most effective and commonly used emotional regulation strategy to improve individual emotional state. Will it consume cognitive resources needed for subsequent cognitive control tasks? The results of previous studies on this issue are not consistent. The reason may be that previous studies treated reappraisal as a single strategy, and did not distinguish sub-types of reappraisal to explore this issue. Reappraisal can be divided into self-focused and situation-focused reappraisal. According to previous studies, this two reappraisal strategies may have different effects on subsequent cognitive control tasks. However, there is no direct experimental comparison of this issue has been explored. In this study, self-focused reappraisal (n = 23) and situation-focused reappraisal (n = 26) were used to investigate whether attempts to increase or decrease negative emotions had different effects on subsequent cognitive control tasks. All participants completed a cross-combination paradigm of cognitive reappraisal and Stroop task. Event-related potential (ERP) was used to assess the effectiveness of the regulated emotion (late positive potential, LPP) during the reappraisal phase, as well as to assess the cognitive resource (P300) and cognitive control (sustained potential: SP) during the Stroop task. The results showed that both reappraisal strategies could effectively regulate emotion at the level of subjective reporting. In addition, on the level of arousal, increase negative > view negative > decrease negative > watch neutral, as opposite to the valence rating. Furthermore, EEG results of the reappraisal stage showed that self-focused reappraisal will trigger larger LPP amplitude than situation-focused reappraisal whether it increases or decreases negative emotions. This proved that situation-focused reappraisal was more effective than self-focused reappraisal when negative emotions decreased. On the contrary, self-focused reappraisal Emotions was more effective than situation-focused reappraisal when negative emotions increased. Compared with the three emotional regulation conditions that appear in negative stimulus pictures, the interference scores of accuracy rate for viewing neutral picture conditions were significantly greater. While, compared with the other three emotional regulation conditions, the P300 interference score of increases negative emotional conditions was significantly smaller. The result of situation-focused reappraisal inconsistent condition SP amplitude minus the consistent condition difference was higher than the self-focused reappraisal. It could be considered the SP amplitude interference score of situation-focused reappraisal was more positive than that of self-focused reappraisal. In conclusion, the results of this study indicated that (1) self-focused reappraisal and situation-focused reappraisal can effectively regulate emotions, while the regulate effects were different; (2) compared to neutral stimuli, negative stimuli trigger higher levels of negative emotions and subsequent poorer cognitive control of conflicting tasks from a behavioral perspective; (3) compared with watching and reducing negative emotions, increasing negative emotions may further deplete the available cognitive resources for subsequent tasks at the level of neural mechanisms. Furthermore, situational focus reappraisal had a greater impact on cognitive control of subsequent conflict tasks after decreasing negative emotions than self-focus reappraisal.