| Emotion regulation is characterized by one's ability to consciously modulate experienced and expressed emotion. Poor emotion regulation skills have been associated with a variety of negative physical and emotional outcomes. Although these relationships have been identified, there is inconsistency as to how emotion regulation is measured. Currently, self-report measures are the most common measurement approach, but they have several limitations, including the subjective nature of the technique. Within the past two decades the affective modulation of startle (AMS) has been proposed as a more objective measure of emotional regulation/processing. In the basic AMS paradigm, participants view positive, negative, and neutral images. While viewing the images a startle-eliciting noise is presented. Participants' startle responses are largest when the startle noise is presented during the viewing of a negative image and smallest during the viewing of a positive image, compared to a neutral image viewing condition. More recently, a modified AMS paradigm has been utilized as a measure of emotion regulation. This modified technique provides cues or instructions about the upcoming affective image and allows participants the opportunity to regulate their emotional response to each image. The aim of this dissertation is to determine if there is evidence to support the reliability and validity of this modified emotion regulation measurement technique. Specifically, this study tests indicators of the convergent, concurrent, and predictive validity of the cued AMS paradigm. Results did not support hypotheses, but did indicate that participants respond significantly different when provided an informative-cue to an upcoming negative stimulus compared to an uninformative-cue. These results, while unexpected, provide evidence in support of future research examining the measurement of emotion regulation with the modified AMS model while taking into account cue-induced anxiety, type of regulation strategy used, as well as possible controls such as level of distress. |
