Experimental Evidence For Chinese Medicine’s Hypothesis On Mutual Restriction Of Emotion

In contrast to modern psychology that regards the process of emotional regulation as mainly a top-down control where one’s cognition plays a key role in regulating one’s emotional arousal especially the unpleasant or unwanted one, Chinese medicine regards the relationship among different types of emotions (including sadness, fear, anger, joy, and anxiety) as being promoting and/or counteracting with each other ("promoting" effects include:joy promotes anxiety, anxiety promotes sadness, sadness promotes fear, fear promotes anger, and anger promotes joy;"counteracting" effects include:joy counteracts sadness, sadness counteracts anger, anger counteracts anxiety, anxiety counteracts fear, and fear counteracts joy). This provides a different and interesting perspective to understand the dynamic transformation of different human emotions, and may have new and important implications for the practice of emotional regulation in the field of mental health. The aim of the present study was to experimentally examine two of the crucial hypothesis in the above-mentioned Chinese medicine model:sadness counteracts (or alleviates) anger and fear promotes (or reinforces) anger,In experiment1,90undergraduate participants were angered by an experimental procedure where their partners (they had never met) gave them very negative and aggressive feedback on the thesis they have written. Then, these displeased participants were divided into three equivalent groups and were shown with different emotion-inducing materials (video pieces) to produce sadness (the Sad Group, SG), fear (the Fear Group, FG), or neutral (the Control Group, CG) emotion respectively. Finally, each group’s level of anger was evaluated at both of the feeling and behavior level:participants were required to evaluate their emotional state especially these related to anger, they were also ask to plan a competitive reaction time task with the partner who had given them very low evaluation and decide the level of punishment when they won the game.It turned out that participants in SG exhibited significantly less aggressive behavior than those in CG and FG, thus supporting the hypothesis of sadness alleviates anger, whereas the participants in FG reported higher level of anger relative to those in CG and SG, thus supporting the hypothesis of fear promotes anger. However, it is worth noting that the participants in SG showed higher level of negative emotional arousal relative to those in CG, this implied that if "sadness counteracts anger" were adopted as the strategy to control one’s anger and aggressive behavior, it may also increase the risk of producing more negative emotion.Inspired by the first experiment, experiment2were mainly investigated if there were differences between SG and CG in the level of depression and implicit aggressiveness.The final results confirmed the participants in SG performed higher level of depression than those in CG, which suggested the negative effects of "sadness counteracts anger".In general, the fact that the afterwards inducing of sadness emotion could significantly reduce insulted participants’aggressive behavior provided experimental evidence for Chinese medicine’s hypothesis of "sadness counteracts anger". And the fact that the inducing of fear could increase the level of angry feelings supported the hypothesis of "fear promotes anger".