Comparison Of The Effects And Resource Consumption Of Three Emotion Regulation Strategies

Emotion is an interactive process of physiological change,cognitive interpretation,subjective experience and behavior expression caused by emotional evoked events.In this process,individuals continuously adjust their own or others' subjective emotional experience,external behavior expression and physiological reaction to achieve the adaptive goal.In different stages of emotional production,individuals adopt some conventional ways to regulate the types of emotions they generate as well as the way they experience and express emotions.The effect of emotion regulation strategy is affected by many factors.This study focuses on the influence of consciousness state and emotional intensity on the regulation effect of emotion regulation strategies.At the same time,as a goal-driven behavior,emotional regulation requires the participation of cognitive control mechanisms.In the process of using emotion regulation strategies,individuals often need to consume cognitive control resources to achieve the purpose of emotion regulation.Therefore,the comparison of resource consumption of various emotion regulation strategies is also the focus of this study.In order to compare the effects of three emotion regulation strategies of distraction,cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression on the negative emotions of high and low intensity,Study1 used 2(state of consciousness: conscious vs.unconscious)×3(emotion strategies: distraction vs.reappraisal vs.suppression)×2(emotion intensity: high vs.low)mixed design.The study used a scrambled sentence task to initiate the subjects' unconscious regulation strategy,and the instructions to initiate the subjects' conscious regulation strategy.Negative emotional pictures of high and low intensity were selected from the Chinese Emotional Picture System(CEPS)to induce negative emotions of different intensity.Taking subjective negative emotional experience of subjects as dependent variable,the effects of three emotion regulation strategies were investigated.Studies have found that distraction can effectively regulate high-intensity negative emotions in the conscious state,and low-intensity negative emotions in the unconscious state.Cognitive reappraisal can only effectively regulate negative emotions of high and low intensity in the conscious state.Expression suppression can only effectively regulate high-intensity negative emotions in the conscious state.In order to comprehensively measure the effect of the emotion regulation strategy under unconscious and conscious state,Study2 measured subjects' physiological reaction,subjective experience and behavioral response.On the base of Study1,Study2 is further expanded,using 2(state of consciousness: conscious vs.unconscious)×3(emotion strategies: distraction vs.reappraisal vs.suppression)between-subjects design.In the study,a scrambled sentence task was used to activate the subjects' unconscious cognitive reappraisal strategy and expression suppression strategy,and the instructions were used to activate the subjects' conscious emotion strategy.However,different from Study1,Study2 used white noise interference to activate the unconscious distraction strategy of the subjects,used a film clip to induce negative emotions of the subjects,and measured the effects of emotion regulation strategies from physiological reaction,subjective experience and behavioral expression.It has found that distraction caneffectively down-regulate the physiological response,subjective experience and behavioral response of individuals in the face of negative emotional stimulus.Under the unconscious state,cognitive reappraisal can only effectively reduce the individual's negative physiological response,but under the conscious state,it can effectively down-regulate the individual's physiological response,subjective experience and behavioral response.The expression suppression strategy has the strongest limitation.It can only effectively reduce the negative physiological response of individuals in the unconscious state,and can effectively reduce the negative physiological response and behavioral response of individuals in the conscious state.In order to compare the cognitive control resource consumptions of three emotion regulation strategies under two states of unconsciousness,Study3 used 2(state of consciousness: conscious vs.unconscious)×3(emotion strategies: distraction vs.reappraisal vs.suppression)between-subjects design.The study used instructions to activate the subjects' conscious regulation strategies,a scrambled sentence task and white noise interference were used to activate the subjects' unconscious regulation strategies.Meanwhile,Attention Network Test(ANT)and Stroop task were used to investigate the cognitive control resource consumption of the subjects.It has found that ANT task showed that none of the three unconscious emotion regulation strategies consumed cognitive control resources,while the conscious expression suppression strategy consumed a large number of cognitive control resources.Stroop task showed that none of the three unconscious emotion regulation strategies consumed cognitive control resources,while conscious distraction and cognitive reappraisal consumed a large number of cognitive control resources.The three experiments of the study were conducted around the effects and resource consumptions of three emotion regulation strategies:distraction,cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression.Study1 and Study2 compared the regulation effects of the three strategies,and Study3 compared the cognitive control resource consumptions of the three strategies.This study not only compares the effects of three emotion regulation strategies,but also compares the costs they should pay,which provides an empirical basis for the choice of the maximize benefits of emotion regulation strategies.In the aspect of practical application,the influence of emotional intensity on emotional regulation strategy is discussed from the perspective of two consciousness state,which provides support for the use of emotional regulation strategy in clinical practice and counseling in the future.