Implementation-intention-based Automatic Cognitive Reappraisal Modulates Disgust Emotion: Neural Basis And Individual Differences

The ability to regulate emotions is important for our health,well-being and social function,whereas impaired emotion regulation abilities are associated with many mental disorders,such as major depression and generalized anxiety disorder.Since James J Gross proposed the process model of emotion regulation in 1998,most studies of emotion regulation to date focused on the conscious,voluntary,and resource-demanding forms of emotion regulation,known as voluntary emotion regulation.However,voluntary emotion regulation comes at the cost of individuals' cognitive resource consumption,which may result in failure of emotion regulation especially when individuals are lack of cognitive resources or with impaired cognitive control.Therefore,investigating how effectively regulate emotions with little or even without cognitive costs is a timely and important research question with high relevance for both basic and clinical research.A series of behavioral and electrophysiological studies provides evidence for that combination of emotion regulation and automatic goal pursuit can regulate emotions automatically,and thus reduce cognitive costs.The present research further examines the behavioral-brain basis of and individual differences of emotion regulation by implementation intention at both behavioral(subjective reports and questionnaire)and neural levels.The present thesis mainly includes three parts as follows:The first part of the thesis reviewed the conceptual and empirical foundations of both voluntary and automatic emotion regulation,and focused on the definition and research methods of automatic emotion regulation.Based on the limitations of current research of automatic emotion regulation,this part proposed this research's theoretical and practical significance.The second part consists of two empirical studies.The first study used experimental manipulation method to investigate the emotion regulatory effects of implementations and goal intentions at both behavioral and neural levels.Thirty-one college students of Southwest University were payed to participant in this study,and 26 subjects' data were included in the final statistical analysis.Behavioral assessments and functional MRI scans were obtained when subjects viewed neutral and disgust pictures during the watching,the goal intention and the implementation intention based reappraisal conditions.Automatic regulation of negative emotion through implementation intention led to significantly decreased negative feelings,associated with reduced activity in bilateral amygdala and left insula.More importantly,these effects appear to be independent of increasing cognitive efforts,as evidenced by self-reported efforts and cognitive control-related prefrontal engagement.However,the emotion regulatory effects produced by automatic goal pursuit are influenced by individuals' habitual use of emotion regulation.Williams et al.(2009)reported that semantic priming of unconscious reappraisal significantly interacts with trait reappraisal.Specifically,unconscious reappraisal condition was associated with less heart rate reactivity to stress relative to the instructed reappraisal condition in people low in habitual use of reappraisal,while this effect was not significant in people with high reappraisal tendencies.Therefore,the study two aimed to examine whether the regulatory effects of automatic reappraisal were influenced by individuals' trait reappraisal.Participants completed measures of typical reappraisal use by Emotion Regulation Questionnaire(ERQ).The emotion regulation effects were represented by the changes of emotion-processing-regions activity between watching and implementation intention conditions.Results demonstrated that participants with low habitual use of reappraisal scores exhibited significantly lower right amygdala activation during implementation intention than passive watching and goal-guided intention condition.These findings suggest that the effectiveness of automatic implementation-intention-based reappraisal benefits those individuals who do not habitually use reappraisal strategies.The discussion and conclusion constitute the last third part.Based on the current and previous findings of automatic emotion regulation,the author discussed the neural basis and individual differences of automatic reappraisal by implementation intention.In brief,the findings of study one suggest that neural basis of implementationintention-based reappraisal is different from voluntary emotion regulation,as evidenced by that it can down-regulate amygdala and insula activation without increasing activity of cognitive control-related regions;the findings of study two suggest that automatic implementation-intention-based reappraisal benefits those individuals who do not habitually use reappraisal strategies.At last,the author discussed the value and limitations of these two studies,and then pointed out the directions for future research of automatic emotion regulation.