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The electrocortical modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies

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Abstract

The current event-related potential study investigated the modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies on electrocortical responses. When watching negative or neutral pictures, participants were instructed to perform three tasks: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression and passive viewing. We found that negative pictures elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than neutral pictures. Moreover, processes involved in strategy also had an effect on LPP amplitude, which was indicated by a larger LPP in reappraisal compared with suppression and viewing tasks when neutral pictures were presented. After the influence of processes on LPP was excluded, results showed that reappraisal effectively decreased the emotion-enhanced LPP than suppression and viewing. The difference in regulatory effect may be determined by the underlying processing mechanism. A larger frontal-central component, N2, was observed in suppression than reappraisal and viewing, which suggested that it involved the processes focusing on behavioral response. While the larger LPP found in reappraisal implicated that it recruited cognitive processes focusing on the picture meaning.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (31070989), Open Research Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning (CNKOPYB0909). We gratefully thank Aishi Jiang for help on data analysis and Xiaohong Yang for discussion on paper writing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, China

    Shuzhen Gan & Yufang Yang

  2. Department of Applied Psychology, Faculty of Social Administration, Shanghai University of Political Sciences and Law, Shanghai, 201701, China

    Shuzhen Gan

  3. School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, 199 South Chang’an Road, Xi’an, 710062, China

    Jianfeng Yang & Xuhai Chen

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  1. Shuzhen Gan
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Correspondence to Yufang Yang.

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Gan, S., Yang, J., Chen, X. et al. The electrocortical modulation effects of different emotion regulation strategies. Cogn Neurodyn 9, 399–410 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-015-9339-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-015-9339-z

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