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• Stimulus arousal, stimulus type and task setting play important roles in emotional bias. • Increased stimulus arousal enlarges negativity bias. • Scenic stimulus leads to negativity bias while verbal stimulus results in positivity offset. • Explicit relative to implicit emotion task increases negativity bias. Emotional bias, which describes human's asymmetric processing of emotional stimuli, consists of negativity bias (Increased response to negative over positive stimuli) and positivity offset (the reversed phenomenon). Previous studies suggest that stimulus arousal (high/low), stimulus type (scenic/verbal), cultural background (Eastern/Western), and task setting (explicit/implicit) may modulate emotional bias, but with inconclusive findings. To address how the profile of emotional bias varies with these factors, a meta-analysis of emotional P3 event-related potential amplitudes was performed. Forty-nine effect sizes from 38 studies involving 1263 subjects were calculated using Hedges' g. The results highlight significant moderators of arousal, stimulus type, and task setting. Specifically, high-arousal stimuli enhance negativity bias relative to low-arousal stimuli; scenic stimulus leads to a negativity bias while verbal stimulus is linked with a positivity offset; explicit emotion tasks lead to negativity bias, whereas implicit emotion tasks do not exhibit emotional bias. These results indicate that emotional bias is labile depending on stimulus arousal, stimulus type and task setting. The implication of these findings for emotion regulation is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Test anxiety is a prevalent issue that many individuals struggle with. Previous research has indicated that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism are more prone to experiencing test anxiety. However, there is some indirect evidence suggesting that cognitive reappraisal may play a role in moderating this relationship. Thus, the present work aimed to examine the role of cognitive reappraisal in the effect of neuroticism on test anxiety through two studies. Methods: Study 1 used a questionnaire approach, utilizing the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI), the Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Five-factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) with a sample of 596 participants. Study 2 conducted a test-related emotional picture rating task to better measure emotional responses. A total of 180 participants took part in Study 2. Results: Study 1 and Study 2 have converged results: (1) neuroticism positively predicted individuals' test anxiety; (2) the predictive effect of neuroticism on test anxiety was moderated by cognitive reappraisal—the higher cognitive reappraisal ability, the lower the predictive effect of neuroticism on test anxiety. Conclusions: These results indicate that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism may experience stronger test anxiety, while cognitive reappraisal can mitigate test anxiety in neurotic individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acceptance of emotion is important for humans' wellbeing and social functioning. Despite its regulatory advantages, the temporal dynamics of acceptance for regulating decision-related emotion remains unclear. For this purpose, Event-related potentials were recorded for outcome presentation, when participants either in explicit or implicit acceptance condition performed a Gambling Task. Results showed that acceptance effectively regulated emotional experiences, irrespective of how it was realized (explicit/implicit). Compared to viewing condition, explicit acceptance increased overall amplitudes of feedback-related negativity (FRN,180-240 ms) at the early stage and reduced P3 amplitude (240–440 ms) in general at the late stage, regardless of feedback valence or magnitude. By contrast, implicit acceptance did not influence the FRN amplitudes but increased the P3 amplitudes globally, an effect unaffected by feedback valence and magnitude. In addition, the P3 amplitude for explicit acceptance was negatively correlated with the ratio of risky choices, regardless of outcome valence. These results suggest that explicit acceptance is associated with cognitive conflict and resource depletion, while these adverse effects are not engendered during implicit acceptance. These regulatory effects are independent of specific feedback valence and magnitude. These findings highlight the role of implicit acceptance in cognitive demanding context, such as decision-making. • The temporal dynamics of explicit and implicit acceptance for regulating outcome-related emotion. • P3 amplitudes negatively predict risky choices. • Implicit acceptance regulates decision-related emotions without cognitive costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reappraisal of negative events is known to be useful in decreasing their emotional impact. However, existent evidence for this conclusion mostly relies on conscious, deliberate reappraisal that comes with the cost of cognitive efforts. The aim of the present study was to compare emotion regulation effects of conscious and unconscious reappraisal, which has been shown to be less costly in previous studies. Subjects randomly assigned to an unconscious reappraisal, conscious reappraisal, and control condition performed a frustrating arithmetic task. Subjective emotional experience and heart-rate reactivity were recorded. Participants primed with unconscious reappraisal showed the same decrease in heart-rate reactivity as those explicitly instructed to reappraise. In addition, the unconscious reappraisal group did not show reductions in subjective negative emotion, whereas this was significantly decreased in the conscious reappraisal group. Heart-rate reactivity was positively correlated with negative emotion ratings and negatively correlated with the positive emotion ratings. These results suggest that unconscious reappraisal is only effective in decreasing physiological consequences of frustrating emotion, but not in reducing subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic emotion regulation (AER) plays a vital role in the neuropathology underlying both suicide and self-harm via modifying emotional impact effortlessly. However, both the effortless account and the neural mechanisms of AER are undetermined. To investigate the neural changes at AER, we collected functional MRI (fMRI) in 31 participants who attended to neutral and disgust pictures in three conditions: watching, goal intention (GI), and reappraisal by implementation intention (RII). Results showed that RII (but not GI) decreased negative feelings and bilateral amygdala activity without increasing cognitive efforts, evidenced by the reduced effort rating and less prefrontal engagement during RII compared with during watching and GI. These emotion-regulatory effects of RII cannot be explained by emotional habituation, as the supplementary experiment (N = 31) showed no emotional habituation effects when the same disgust pictures were presented repeatedly three times for each watching and GI condition. Task-based network analysis showed both RII and GI relative to watching increased functional connectivities (FCs) of the ventral anterior cingulate cortex to the left insula and right precuneus during conditions, two FCs subserving goal setup. However, RII relative to GI exhibited weaker FCs in brain networks subserving effortful control, memory retrieval, aversive anticipation, and motor planning. In these FCs, the FC intensity of putamen-operculum/lingual and paracentral-superior temporal gyri positively predicted regulatory difficulty ratings. These findings suggest that the setup of implementation intention automatizes emotion regulation by reducing the online mobilization of emotion-coping neural systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive reappraisal is associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), while spontaneous activity patterns of the default mode network (DMN) is implicated in reappraisal and MDD. However, neural mechanisms subserving the close association of spontaneous reappraisal and depression are unclear. Spontaneous reappraisal, depression and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) were measured from 105 healthy subjects. We assessed the temporal complexity (Hurst exponent), Regional Homogeneity (ReHo) and fractional Amplitude of Low Frequency Fluctuation (fALFF) profiles of DMN, a network involved in both reappraisal and depression. Mediation effects of these standard measures on the relationship between reappraisal and depression, and the contributions of each DMN subregion, were assessed. Results indicated that Hurst exponent (H) of DMN, whether extracted by independent component analysis (ICA) or region of interest (ROI), was significantly associated with reappraisal scores. An individual with a higher reappraisal score has a lower Hurst value of DMN. Mediation analyses suggest that H of DMN partially mediates the association between reappraisal and the degree of depression, and this mediation effect arises from the contribution of medial prefrontal cortex. Neither ReHo nor fALFF showed a similar correlation or mediation effect. These findings suggest that temporal dynamics of DMN play an important role in emotion regulation and its association with depression. H of DMN may serve as a neural marker mediating the association between reappraisal and depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional regulation is known to be associated with activity in the amygdala. The amygdala is an emotion-generative region that comprises of structurally and functionally distinct nuclei. However, little is known about the contributions of different frontal-amygdala sub-region pathways to emotion regulation. Here, we investigated how functional couplings between frontal regions and amygdala sub-regions are involved in different spontaneous emotion regulation processes by using an individual-difference approach and a generalized psycho-physiological interaction (gPPI) approach. Specifically, 50 healthy participants reported their dispositional use of spontaneous cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in daily life and their actual use of these two strategies during the performance of an emotional-picture watching task. Results showed that functional coupling between the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA) was associated with higher scores of both dispositional and actual uses of reappraisal. Similarly, functional coupling between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the centromedial amygdala (CMA) was associated with higher scores of both dispositional and actual uses of suppression. Mediation analyses indicated that functional coupling of the right OFC-BLA partially mediated the association between reappraisal and emotional response, irrespective of whether reappraisal was measured by dispositional use (indirect effect(SE)=-0.2021 (0.0811), 95%CI (BC) = [-0.3851, -0.0655]) or actual use (indirect effect(SE)=-0.1951 (0.0796), 95%CI (BC) = [-0.3654, -0.0518])). These findings suggest that spontaneous reappraisal and suppression involve distinct frontal- amygdala functional couplings, and the modulation of BLA activity from OFC may be necessary for changing emotional response during spontaneous reappraisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]