Anxiety, not regulation tendency, predicts how individuals regulate in the laboratory: An exploratory comparison of self-report and psychophysiology.

Anxiety influences how individuals experience and regulate emotions in a variety of ways. For example, individuals with lower anxiety tend to cognitively reframe (reappraise) negative emotion and those with higher anxiety tend to suppress negative emotion. Research has also investigated these individual differences with psychophysiology.

Advances in Emotion-Regulation Choice from Experience Sampling.

Recent experience-sampling studies by Blanke et al. and Grommisch et al. provide insights into how individuals regulate their emotions in daily life.

Emotion dynamics across adulthood in everyday life: Older adults are more emotionally stable and better at regulating desires.

Older adults report experiencing improved emotional health, such as more intense positive affect and less intense negative affect. However, there are mixed findings on whether older adults are better at regulating emotion-a hallmark feature of emotional health-and most research is based on laboratory studies that may not capture how people regulate their emotions in everyday life. We used experience sampling to examine how multiple measures of emotional health, including mean affect, dynamic fluctuations between affective states and the ability to resist desires-a common form of emotion regulation-differ in daily life across adulthood.

Identifying the representational structure of affect using fMRI.

The events we experience day to day can be described in terms of their affective quality: some are rewarding, others are upsetting, and still others are inconsequential. These natural distinctions reflect an underlying representational structure used to classify affective quality. In affective psychology, many experiments model this representational structure with two dimensions, using either the dimensions of valence and arousal, or alternatively, the dimensions of positivity and negativity.

Functional connectivity predicts the dispositional use of expressive suppression but not cognitive reappraisal.

Introduction: Previous research has identified specific brain regions associated with regulating emotion using common strategies such as expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal. However, most research focuses on a priori regions and directs participants how to regulate, which may not reflect how people naturally regulate outside the laboratory.

Method: Here, we used a data-driven approach to investigate how individual differences in distributed intrinsic functional brain connectivity predict emotion regulation tendency outside the laboratory.

Preliminary report on the association between pulvinar volume and the ability to detect backward-masked facial features.

Although backward masking is a powerful experimental tool in mitigating visual awareness of facial expressions of emotion, ~20% of participants consistently report being resistant to its effects. In our previous studies, we excluded these participants from analysis as we focused on neural data in individuals who were subjectively unaware of backward-masked facial features that were presented for a brief period of time (e.g.

Helping Others Regulate Emotion Predicts Increased Regulation of One's Own Emotions and Decreased Symptoms of Depression.

Although much research considers how individuals manage their own emotions, less is known about the emotional benefits of regulating the emotions of others. We examined this topic in a 3-week study of an online platform providing training and practice in the social regulation of emotion. We found that participants who engaged more by helping others (vs.

Finding Positive Meaning in Negative Experiences Engages Ventral Striatal and Ventromedial Prefrontal Regions Associated with Reward Valuation.

Neuroimaging research has identified systems that facilitate minimizing negative emotion, but how the brain is able to transform the valence of an emotional response from negative to positive is unclear. Behavioral and psychophysiological studies suggest a distinction between minimizing reappraisal, which entails diminishing the arousal elicited by negative stimuli, and positive reappraisal, which instead changes the emotional valence of arousal from negative to positive. Here we show that successful minimizing reappraisal tracked with decreased activity in the amygdala, but successful positive reappraisal tracked with increased activity in regions involved in computing reward value, including the ventral striatum and ventromedial pFC (vmPFC).