| Emotion regulation is essential for individuals to adapt to society,and also an important factor impacting mental health.Regulation of emotion can be obtained by different strategies.The specifical strategy was not always adaptive or maladaptive;in contrast,the adaptability relied on the flexible choice of strategies in appropriate environment.Emotion regulation choice as a concrete manifestation of decision-making,is influenced by motivation,the important function of emotion.Although category of motivation impacted the choice of emotion regulation strategies,it is unknown whether the emotional motivation play a role on emotion regulation choice.To address the question,this study gradually explored the influence of motivational intensity and direction on emotion regulation choice through three experiments and investigated attention mechanism and neuro-electrophysiological characteristics underlying the effect.In experiment 1,we aimed to explore whether the motivational intensity and direction in emotion could impact emotion regulation choice.To achieve this goal,thirty participants(13 male,17 female)were required to choose emotion regulation strategies,reappraisal or distraction,to regulate their emotion in emotional contexts that varied in motivational direction and intensity.We found that distraction was chosen more often over reappraisal in high-intensity-motivated emotion,while the reverse patten was observed in low-intensity-motivated emotion.We didn’t find the effect of motivational direction in experiment 1.To verify the findings in experiment1 and investigate how motivation impact emotion regulation choice,we added Global-Local task to measure the attention breadth in Experiment 2.In this experiment,we supplied neutral pictures as a control condition.Replicating the results in Experiment1,we found that the high-intensity motivated emotion was corelated with more choice of distraction,while reappraisal was chosen more in low-intensity motivated emotional context.More importantly,this effect was partially mediated by attention breadth.In addition,we found that withdrawal-motivated emotional context was associated with more reappraisal choices than approach-motivated context,an effect that,however,vanished when valence was controlled.Further to investigate the neural mechanism underlying the effect of motivation on emotion regulation choice,Experiment 3 recorded and analyzed the ERP component in different emotional conditions.Consistent with Experiment 2,pictures different in motivational intensity and direction were used to induce participants’ emotion and then they complected the Global-Local task and emotion regulation choice task.Results from behavioral data showed that the intensity of emotional motivation impacted attention breadth and emotion regulation choice,which repeated the findings of Experiment 1 and2.However,the results didn’t suggest the effect of motivational direction.ERP results showed that the LPP average wave in high-intensity motivated emotional context was significantly higher than that in low-intensity motivated and neutral conditions,which indicated that the experimental manipulation is effective.Besides,we also found that LPP waves could negatively predict participants’ choice of reappraisal.Specifically,high-intensity motivated emotions induce larger LPP waves,which could prompt more choice of distraction than reappraisal.This research provided insights into people’s choice of strategies for emotion regulation in different motivational states and found the attentional mechanism underlying the influence.At the same time,we also analyzed the electrophysiological feature of this effect by ERP technology.It filled the theoretical gaps in the current research on emotion regulation choice;and supported the motivational dimensional model of affect from the perspective of emotion regulation.Moreover,both the depression and addicts have difficulty in choosing emotion regulation strategies.This research could supply a reference for their emotion regulation training. |
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