The generality of effects of emotional experience on emotion-regulation choice.

To understand how emotional experiences affect general strategic preferences, we assessed participants' preferred strategies of regulating emotional responses to previewed and not-yet-encountered stimuli. For previewed stimuli, participants selected distraction more often than reappraisal for high- (vs. low-) intensity negative-valence visual images (replicating Sheppes, Scheibe, Suri, & Gross, 2011), and the same intensity/choice pattern emerged for previewed auditory sounds.

An Investigation of the Reliability and Self-Regulatory Correlates of Conflict Adaptation.

The study of the conflict-adaptation effect, in which encountering information-processing conflict attenuates the disruptive influence of information-processing conflicts encountered subsequently, is a burgeoning area of research. The present study investigated associations among performance measures on a Stroop-trajectory task (measuring Stroop interference and conflict adaptation), on a Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST; measuring cognitive flexibility), and on self-reported measures of self-regulation (including impulsivity and tenacity). We found significant reliability of the conflict-adaptation effects across a two-week period, for response-time and accuracy.

Conflict adaptation within but not across NoGo decision criteria: Event-related-potential evidence of specificity in the contextual modulation of cognitive control.

From the standpoint of conflict-monitoring theory (Botvinick et al., 2001), detecting an incident of information-processing conflict should attenuate the disruptive influence of information-processing conflicts encountered subsequently, by which time cognitive-control operations will have been engaged. To examine the generality of this conflict-adaptation process across task dimensions, the present research analyzed event-related potentials in a Go/NoGo task that randomly varied the NoGo decision criterion applied across trials.