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Suppression and enhancement of emotional responses to unpleasant pictures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2000

DAREN C. JACKSON ,
JESSICA R. MALMSTADT ,
CHRISTINE L. LARSON  and
RICHARD J. DAVIDSON
DAREN C. JACKSON
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
JESSICA R. MALMSTADT
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
CHRISTINE L. LARSON
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
RICHARD J. DAVIDSON
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
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Abstract

Despite the prominence of emotional dysfunction in psychopathology, relatively few experiments have explicitly studied emotion regulation in adults. The present study examined one type of emotion regulation: voluntary regulation of short-term emotional responses to unpleasant visual stimuli. In a sample of 48 college students, both eyeblink startle magnitude and corrugator activity were sensitive to experimental manipulation. Instructions to suppress negative emotion led to both smaller startle eyeblinks and decreased corrugator activity. Instructions to enhance negative emotion led to larger startle eyeblinks and increased corrugator activity. Several advantages of this experimental manipulation are discussed, including the use of both a suppress and an enhance emotion condition, independent measurement of initial emotion elicitation and subsequent regulation of that emotion, the use of a completely within-subjects design, and the use of naturalistic emotion regulation strategies.

Keywords

Emotion regulationEyeblink startle magnitudeCorrugator
Type
Research Article
Information
Psychophysiology , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , July 2000 , pp. 515 - 522
Copyright
2000 Society for Psychophysiological Research

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