doi:10.1093/scan/nsu124
SCAN (2015) 10, 824 ^ 831
Implicit emotion regulation affects outcome evaluation
Qiwei Yang,1 Ping Tang,1 Ruolei Gu,1,2 Wenbo Luo,3 and Yue-jia Luo1,4
1
Sichuan Research Center of Applied Psychology, Chengdu Medical College, Chengdu 610500, 2Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of
Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, 3Laboratory of Cognition and Mental Health, Chongqing University of Arts and
Sciences, Chongqing 402160, and 4Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 5108060, China
Efficient implicit emotion regulation processes, which run without awareness, are important for human well-being. In this study, to investigate the influence
of implicit emotion regulation on psychological and electrophysiological responses to gains and losses, participants were required to select between two
Chinese four-character idioms to match the meaning of the third one before they performed a monetary gambling task. According to whether their
meanings were related to emotion regulation, the idioms fell into two categories. Event-related potentials and self-rating emotional experiences to
outcome feedback were recorded during the task. Priming emotion regulation reduced subjective emotional experience to both gains and losses and
the amplitudes of the feedback-related negativity, while the P3 component was not influenced. According to these results, we suggest that the application
of implicit emotion regulation effectively modulated the subjective emotional experience and the motivational salience of current outcomes without the
cost of cognitive resources. This study implicates the potential significance of implicit emotion regulation in decision-making processes.
Keywords: implicit emotion regulation; outcome evaluation; emotional experience; event-related potential (ERP); feedback-related negativity
(FRN); P3
INTRODUCTION
During decision-making, outcome feedback are to be evaluated to
discern whether they show positive or negative values, which consequently modulate the following decisions of an agent (Ernst and
Paulus, 2005). Rewards and punishments associated with outcome
feedback induce positive and negative emotions, correspondingly
(Rolls, 2000). Outcome feedback and their concomitant emotions
lead to learning and adaptive decision-making (Cohen et al., 2011).
However, there is sufficient evidence that emotions can induce unwanted biases in decision-making (such as Bower, 1991; Lerner
et al., 2004; Shiv et al., 2005). Emotional responses thus need to be
regulated to avoid interfering with rational thinking. Recent studies
confirm that emotion regulation reduces behavioral loss aversion
(Sokol-Hessner et al., 2009, 2012) and the susceptibility to framing
(Miu and Cris an, 2011), and promotes optimal decisions (Seo and
Barrett, 2007; Heilman et al., 2010). Furthermore, emotion regulation
modulates physiological correlates in decision-making (Martin and
Delgado, 2011; Sokol-Hessner et al., 2012; Grecucci et al., 2013;
Yang et al., 2013), as well as subjective emotional experience to both
gains and losses (Yang et al., 2013).
Research on emotion regulation has traditionally focused on the strategies of explicit or deliberative emotion regulation (e.g.cognitive reappraisal) that require conscious effort for initiation and demand
certain levels of monitoring during implementation, as well as insight
and awareness (Gyurak et al., 2011). Explicit emotion regulation strategies are top-down controlled and resource-demanding. Thus, using
explicit emotion regulation strategies during decision-making may
result in competitions in cognitive resources, which affects the ability
to make optimal choices accordingly. This point is particularly important regarding that decision-making processes share common cognitive
components with explicit emotion regulation (Mitchell, 2011; Yang
Received 10 April 2014; Revised 4 September 2014; Accepted 17 September 2014
Advance Access publication 20 October 2014
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31300847, 81471376,
91132704), the National Key Basic Research Program of China (973Program, 2011CB711000, 2014CB744600),
Sichuan Research Planning Project of Philosophy and Social Science (SC13E024) the foundation of the National
Key Laboratory of Human Factors Engineering (HF2012-K-03), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities (2012CXQT01).
Correspondence should be addressed to Ruolei Gu, Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology,
Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100101, China, E-mail: [email protected]
et al., 2013). As such, it would be more adaptive if people regulate
their emotions without the need for conscious effort when making decisions. A growing number of studies have confirmed that a host of
emotion-regulation processes operate at implicit levels (Mauss et al.,
2007a; Berkman and Lieberman, 2009; Williams et al., 2009). In contrast
to explicit or deliberative emotion regulation, implicit emotion regulation, which has also been referred as automatic (Mauss et al., 2007a,b) or
incidental emotion regulation (Lieberman et al., 2007; Berkman and
Lieberman, 2009), operates without the need for conscious supervision
or explicit intentions, and automatically modifies the quality, intensity
or duration of an emotional response (Gyurak et al., 2011; Koole and
Rothermund, 2011). Preliminary studies have shown that implicit emotion regulation could be more efficient than deliberate emotion regulation in modulating emotional reactions to gains and losses (FentonO’Creevy et al., 2012), as well as reducing emotional responses to emotional pictures (Christou-Champi et al., 2015). Possibly owing to their
pervasiveness and broad significance, processes of implicit emotion
regulation have been studied using a wide variety of methods. One
methodological strategy consists of manipulating implicit regulatory
processes with priming techniques. For instance, Mauss et al. (2007b)
asked participants to construct four-word sentences that contain emotional control terms, which successfully activated the goal of regulating
subsequent emotional responses. Williams et al. (2009) found that the
effect of nonconscious reappraisal priming on physiological reactivity
was most pronounced for those who did not habitually use reappraisal
strategies. The current study investigates the modulating effect of priming emotion regulation on outcome evaluation.
In event-related potential (ERP) studies, two ERP components are
particularly sensitive to the processing of outcome feedback. The first
component is called feedback-related negativity (FRN) or medialfrontal negativity, which is a negative deflection located in the
fronto-central region, being more pronounced for negative feedback
than for positive feedback (Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Wu and
Zhou, 2009; Foti et al., 2011).1 According to the classical reinforcement
1
Some recent studies argue that the FRN is actually a reward positivity, which increases for monetary gains
than losses (see Holroyd et al., 2008b; Baker and Holroyd, 2011; Holroyd et al., 2011; Cherniawsky and Holroyd,
2013 for details). The debate is ongoing and beyond the interest of this article. For the purposes of the present
research, we follow in the footsteps of most previous studies, which interpret the FRN as a negative-going
component.
The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
Implicit emotion regulation affects outcome evaluation
learning–error-related negativity theory, the FRN represents the transmission of a prediction error signal (i.e.the difference between the
predicted value and obtained value of rewards) from midbrain dopamine neurons to the anterior cingulated cortex (Holroyd and Coles,
2002). Larger FRN amplitudes indicate stronger motivational impact
of the current event (Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Yeung and
Sanfey, 2004; Yeung et al., 2005). The second component is the P3
or P300, which is a centro-parietal positivity that is often associated
with allocation of cognitive resources, such that larger P3 amplitudes
indicate more resources are allocated to the ongoing task (Polich, 1987,
2007; Molnár, 1999).
In one of our previous studies, cognitive reappraisal (one of the
strategies of explicit emotion regulation) was applied while participants were performing a gambling task. The results indicated that
cognitive reappraisal reduced subjective emotional experience to
both gains and losses and the amplitudes of the FRN and P3 (Yang
et al., 2013). In the present study, we investigate the impact of priming
reappraisal on outcome evaluation by asking participants to match the
meaning of Chinese four-character idioms2 before they completed the
gambling task. This matching task was disguised as a measure of language capability, and the participants were rewarded for each correctly
matched idiom. The four-character idioms fell into two categories, that
was, whether their meanings were relevant or irrelevant to emotion
regulation (see the Method section). Emotion regulation and neutral
control were thus primed in two conditions with the corresponding
category of idioms. We hypothesized that priming emotion regulation
would implicitly reduce subjective emotional experience elicited by
outcome feedback, and modulate its motivational salience of current
outcomes, which would be reflected on reduced FRN amplitude.
Because implicit emotion regulation was evoked automatically without
the need for conscious effort, priming emotion regulation was not
supposed to affect the P3 amplitude, which is an index of allocation
of cognitive resources (Wickens et al., 1983).
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Participants
Thirty-two right-handed students from Beijing Normal University participated in the experiment. Two of them were excluded from further
data analysis owing to excessive artifacts such that too few uncontaminated trials were available (<70% of trials in the data). The remaining
30 participants (14 females; mean age ¼ 22.1 2.3 years) were free of
regular medication use or other nonmedical substances that might
influence the central nervous system. All participants had normal
vision (with or without correction); none had a history of neurological
disease. All participants provided their informed consent before the
experiment. The experimental protocol was approved by the local
ethics committee (Beijing Normal University).
Stimulus materials
Sixty Chinese four-character idioms were included in the matching
task. These idioms were classified into two categories according to
their meanings, i.e. emotion regulation and neutral idioms. The category of emotion regulation consisted of 20 idioms that are highly
commendatory sayings in traditional Chinese cultures, which emphasize the significance of emotion regulation. They either advise people
to calm down when encountering any consequence or encourage
people to accept irrevocable outcomes in the unpredictable world
(e.g. ‘
’, which means keeping calm in an emergency).
2
Most of the traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions (‘
’, chengyu) consist of four characters, which are
widely used in both spoken and written Chinese language. Some of these idioms provide life suggestions or moral
lessons, while others are merely descriptions of certain kinds of phenomena.
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825
The category of neutral idioms are descriptions of natural phenomena
(e.g. ‘
’, which means the water and the sky merge in one
color), which are irrelevant to emotion regulation. All the 60 idioms
were evaluated using a 9-point scale by 30 students (20 females, mean
age ¼ 21.74 1.70) from Chengdu Medical College, none of whom
participated in the formal experiment. The 9-point scale combined
arousal and valence dimensions of affective experience (Russell,
1980; Bradley et al., 2001). The translated Chinese instructions of the
9-point scale read as follows.
‘Please evaluate your emotional experience to the idiom on a scale of
1 to 9, among which 5 indicates that you feel calm and bland. From 5
to 9, the positive affects of pleasure, satisfaction or excitement
strengthen more and more. From 5 to 1, the negative affects of disappointment, depression or anger strengthen more and more.’
A paired-samples t-test revealed that emotional experiences are not
significantly different between the emotion regulation and the neutral
idioms (6.19 vs 6.26, t(29) ¼ 0.61, P ¼ 0.54).
Experimental design and procedure
The participants were required to complete a gambling task of 400
trials under two prime conditions, i.e. emotion regulation and neutral
prime, according to the category of the idioms used in the matching
task. Each prime condition consisted of 10 successive blocks of 20 trials
each, and the sequence of the two conditions was randomized across
participants. Before each block of the gambling task, the participants
were required to complete a trial of the matching task, i.e. selecting
between two Chinese four-character idioms (F for the alternative on
the left and J for the right) at the bottom of the screen to match the
meaning of a third one in the center of the screen. In the emotion
regulation prime condition, each trial of the matching task contained
at least two idioms that belonged to the category of emotion regulation, while in neutral prime condition, all the three idioms belonged to
the category of neutral idioms. Participants were told that the matching task was to measure language capability and was irrelevant to the
gambling task.
During the gambling task, the participant sat comfortably in an
electrically shielded room, 100 cm in front of a computer screen. A
single trial of the gambling task entailed the following sequence: initially, a fixation cross appeared on the screen center, adjoined on either
side by two rectangles for 500 ms. The numbers 5 and 25 (5 Jiao and 25
Jiao Chinese renminbi (RMB), indicating the amount of bet, 8 and
40 US cents, respectively) were then simultaneously and respectively
presented in one of the two rectangles until the participant had conducted his/her choice by pressing the F or J keys on the keyboard with
his/her left or right index finger (F for the alternative on the left and J
for the right). The selected alternative was then emphasized by a thickened red outline of the chosen rectangle for 500 ms. All stimuli then
disappeared for a short interval of a random duration between 1000
and 1500 ms; the result of the participant’s choice then appeared with
the ‘þ’ or ‘’ symbols, thus indicating the valence of the outcome
(Figure 1). There were four possible outcomes, þ5, 5, þ25 and 25,
indicating that the participant won or lost 5 or 25 Jiao RMB, respectively. The feedback display remained visible for 1500 ms, and a black
screen was then presented for a short interval that varied randomly
between 800 and 1200 ms. After every 12 trials of the gambling task, the
participant was asked to evaluate his/her emotional experience to the
outcome in the previous trial using the 9-point scale mentioned above.
The stimuli were presented and behavioral responses collected using
E-Prime (Version 1.1, PST, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA).
Before the experiment, the participants were informed that they
were initially rewarded with 60 Yuan RMB (10 dollars) and that 1
Yuan would be added for each trial of the matching task that had been
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Q.Yang et al.
Fig. 1 The sequence of events within a single trial of the monetary decision-making task. The participant was asked to select between two alternatives. Their choice was emphasized for 500 ms. After a
subsequent interval of 1000–1500 ms, the outcome feedback was presented for 1500 ms. After an additional 800–1200 ms, the participant was presented with the next trial. Before each block of 20 trials of the
gambling task, the participant was required to complete a trial of the matching task. After every 12 trials, the participant was asked to evaluate his/her emotional experience to the previous outcome of the
proximate trial using a 9-point scale. RT: Response time.
accomplished correctly. The total bonus money for participation was
60 Yuan plus the reward for the matching task plus the cumulative
outcomes of the gambling task. The participants were encouraged to
respond in a manner that would maximize the reward. Unbeknownst
to the participants, the probability of receiving a positive or negative outcome on any given trials was equal. In both the emotion
regulation and neutral prime conditions, the 9-point scale for the
evaluation of emotional experience appeared for 16 times (i.e. evaluation trials), and the probability of being evaluated was equal for gains
and losses.
The electroencephalogram recordings and data analysis
The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from 64 scalp sites
using tin electrodes mounted in an elastic cap (NeuroScan Inc.,
Herndon, VA, USA), with an online reference to the right mastoid
and off-line algebraic re-reference to the average of the left and right
mastoids. Horizontal electrooculogram was recorded from electrodes
placed at the outer canthi of both eyes. Vertical electrooculogram was
recorded from electrodes placed above and below the left eye. All interelectrode impedance was maintained below 5 k
. The EEG and
electrooculogram were amplified using a 0.05–100 Hz bandpass and
continuously sampled at 1000 Hz/channel. During the off-line analysis,
ocular artifacts were removed from the EEG signal using a regression
procedure implemented in the Neuroscan software (Semlitsch et al.,
1986). Frequencies <0.5 Hz and >30 Hz were digitally filtered. The EEG
was segmented for each trial, beginning 200 ms before the feedback
onset and continuing for 1000 ms. The data were baseline corrected by
subtracting the average activity of that channel during the baseline
period from each sample. Any trials in which the EEG voltages exceeded a threshold of 100 V during the recording period were
excluded from the analysis. After the data preprocessing described
above, the trials survived were determined as artifact-free (losses in
the neutral prime condition: 97.4 3.6 of the 100 trials; gains in the
neutral prime condition: 97.6 2.8; losses in the emotion regulation
prime condition: 96.6 5.2; gains in the emotion regulation prime
condition: 97.6 4.7).
The FRN has been reported to be maximal in the fronto-central area
of the scalp (Holroyd and Krigolson, 2007; Oliveira et al., 2007),
whereas the P3 has been reported to be maximal in the centro-parietal
area (Nieuwenhuis et al., 2005; Lust and Bartholow, 2009). Based on
the topographical distribution of the grand averaged ERP activity and
previous studies (Yang et al., 2013), the following 15 electrode sites
(frontal: Fz, F3, F4; fronto-central: FCz, FC3, FC4; central: Cz, C3, C4;
centro-parietal: CPz, CP3, CP4; and parietal: Pz, P3, and P4) were
initially selected for the statistical analyses of the scalp distribution
of the two components. To minimize the potential overlap between
the FRN and other ERP components, the FRN was measured as the
peak amplitude of the difference wave between negative and positive
trials in a window of 200–400 ms following the feedback presentation
(Holroyd et al., 2004). The P3 was measured as the positive peak
amplitude within the 300–500 ms time window following the feedback
presentation.
For all the statistical analysis, the significance level was set at 0.05.
Greenhouse–Geisser correction for analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests
was used whenever appropriate to correct for sphericity. Post hoc
testing of significant main effects was conducted with least significant
difference (LSD) method. Significant interactions were further examined using simple-effect analysis. Partial eta-squared ( 2p ) was reported
to indicate the effect size in ANOVA tests, where 0.05 represents a
small effect, 0.10 represents a medium effect and 0.20 represents a
Implicit emotion regulation affects outcome evaluation
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827
large effect (Cohen, 1973). Statistical analysis was performed using
SPSS (17.0; SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL).
RESULTS
Behavioral results
The accuracy of behavioral responses during the meaning matching
task was high in both the emotion regulation prime condition
(mean ¼ 0.97, s.d. ¼ 0.07, max ¼ 1.00, min ¼ 0.80) and the neutral
prime condition (mean ¼ 0.97, s.d. ¼ 0.05, max ¼ 1.00, min ¼ 0.80),
and the difference between two conditions was not significant
(t(29) < 1, P ¼ 0.60).
We defined the option ‘25’ to be the risky choice (high risk and high
return) and the option ‘5’ to be the risk-avoidant choice in the gambling task. A paired-samples t-test was used to compare the ratio of
risky choices conducted by each participant between the emotion regulation and neutral prime condition. There was no significant difference
between the average rate of risky choices in the emotion regulation
(0.51, s.d. ¼ 0.17) and neutral prime condition (0.53, s.d. ¼ 0.18;
t(29) < 1, P ¼ 0.40).
Emotional experience
For each participant, each of the four kinds of outcomes (i.e. þ5, þ25,
5, 25) was evaluated more than once in both the emotion regulation and neutral prime conditions, except that ‘þ5’ and ‘5’ were not
evaluated by two participants in the emotion regulation prime condition, and that ‘25’ by another participant in the neutral prime condition because these outcomes did not appear in any of the evaluation
trials. The emotional experience score of each kind of outcome was
averaged for every participant in each condition, and the five missing
data were replaced with the corresponding average score of the remaining participants.
The self-rating scores (Figure 2) were entered into a 2 (Prime
Condition: emotion regulation and neutral) 2 (Valence: positive
and negative) 2 (Magnitude: large and small) ANOVA. The analysis
showed a significant main effect of Magnitude (F(1, 29) ¼ 8.46, P < 0.01,
2p ¼ 0.23), and Valence (F(1, 29) ¼ 281.92, P < 0.001, 2p ¼ 0.91). The
two-way interaction of Prime Condition Valence was significant
(F(1, 29) ¼ 13.31, P < 0.01, 2p ¼ 0.32); the two-way interaction
of Valence Magnitude was also significant (F(1, 29) ¼ 10.81,
P < 0.01, 2p ¼ 0.27). The interaction of Prime Condition Valence Magnitude was significant (F(1, 29) ¼ 7.99, P < 0.01,
2p ¼ 0.22). The simple effect analyses of the interaction of Prime
Condition Valence demonstrated that emotional experience score
was lower in the emotion regulation prime than in the neutral prime
condition (6.32 vs 6.60; F(1, 29) ¼ 7.25, P < 0.05, 2p ¼ 0.20) when outcomes were gains, and higher in emotion regulation than in neutral
prime condition (3.17 vs 2.93; F(1, 29) ¼ 4.71, P < 0.05, 2p ¼ 0.14)
when outcomes were losses. Seeing that ‘5’ indicated the lowest emotional level on the self-rating scale (see the Method section), these results
indicated that emotion regulation prime had a downregulation effect for
emotional experiences to both gains and losses. The simple effect analyses of the interaction of Valence Magnitude demonstrated that the
difference score between 25 and 5 was significant (2.75 vs 3.35, F(1,
29) ¼ 16.33, P < 0.001, 2p ¼ 0.36), whereas difference score between
þ25 and þ5 was not (6.52 vs 6.40, P ¼ 0.34). The simple effect analyses
of the interaction of Prime Condition Valence Magnitude demonstrated that the effects of emotion regulation prime were stronger for
larger outcomes (‘þ25’: 6.29 vs 6.75, F(1, 29) ¼ 15.64, P < 0.001,
2p ¼ 0.35; ‘25’: 2.96 vs 2.53, F(1, 29) ¼ 10.39, P < 0.01, 2p ¼ 0.26)
than for small outcomes (‘þ5’: 6.35 vs 6.45, P ¼ 0.53; ‘5’: 3.37 vs
3.33, P ¼ 0.75).
Fig. 2 The emotional experience scores of four kinds of outcome (large loss, 25; small loss, 5;
large gain, þ25; small gain, þ5). The emotional experience score of 5 meant calm and bland. From
5 to 9, the positive affects of pleasure, satisfaction or excitement strengthened more and more,
whereas from 5 to 1, the negative affects of disappointment, depression or anger strengthened more
and more.
ERP results
FRN amplitude
A 5 (Coronal: anterior to posterior) 3 (Lateral: left, midline, and
right) ANOVA on the peak amplitude of the difference wave between
losses and gains showed that the main effect of Coronal (F(1.48,
43.16) ¼ 8.03, P < 0.01, 2p ¼ 0.24) and Lateral location (F(1.41,
40.84) ¼ 5.30, P < 0.05, 2p ¼ 0.15) was significant at the 15 electrodes.
The effect of the interaction of Coronal Lateral location was not
significant (F(4.96, 143.88) ¼ 1.28, P ¼ 0.30). A post hoc LSD test
showed that the FRN amplitude was larger on midline (4.67 mV)
than on right (4.25 mV, t(29) ¼ 2.07, P < 0.05) and left (4.13 mV,
t(29) ¼ 4.13, P < 0.001) locations, while the right and left locations
did not show significant difference between each other (P ¼ 0.17).
The pairwise comparison of the five sites on midline showed
that FRN amplitude was larger on three anterior cites (Fz, 4.95 mV;
FCz, 5.08; Cz, 5.02) than two posterior cites (CPz, 4.57 mV; Pz, 4.01 mV;
all P values < 0.05), whereas the three anterior sites did not show
significant amplitude differences (P values > 0.05). Thus, the pooled
Fz, FCz and Cz value was selected for further analyses of FRN
amplitude.
A 2 (Prime Condition: emotion regulation and neutral) 2
(Magnitude: large and small) ANOVA for the peak amplitude of the
difference wave between the losses and gains at the pooled Fz/FCz/Cz
revealed a significant main effect of Prime Condition (F(1, 29) ¼ 4.30,
P < 0.05, 2p ¼ 0.13); priming emotion regulation elicited smaller FRN
amplitudes (5.35 mV) than priming neutral idioms (6.52 mV)
(Figure 3). There was a trend toward a larger FRN overall for large
vs small outcomes (P ¼ 0.06), an effect which did not interact with
Prime Condition (P ¼ 0.68).
The P3 amplitude
A 5 (Coronal: anterior to posterior) 3 (Lateral: left, midline and
right) ANOVA on the peak amplitude of P3 showed significant main
effect of the Coronal (F(1.44, 41.79) ¼ 11.53, P < 0.001, 2p ¼ 0.29) and
Lateral location (F(1.95, 56.55) ¼ 9.74, P < 0.001, 2p ¼ 0.25) at the 15
electrodes. The interaction effect of Coronal Lateral location was not
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Fig. 3 The grand average ERPs at the FCz site and the scalp distribution of difference waves when the FRN reached its maximum. Large: ‘25’ to ‘þ25’; small: ‘5’ to ‘þ5’.
significant (P ¼ 0.24). A post hoc LSD test showed that the P3 amplitude was larger on midline (17.14 mV) than on right (16.16 mV)
(P < 0.01) and left (15.93 mV) (P < 0.001) locations, while the right
and left locations did not show a significant difference (P ¼ 0.51).
The pairwise comparison of the five sites on midline showed
that the P3 amplitude was the largest at CPz (CPz, 18.34 mV vs
Fz, 15.23 mV, FCz, 17.11 mV, Cz, 17.79 mV, Pz, 16.82 mV; all P
values < 0.05). Thus, the CPz electrode was selected for further analyses of P3.
The amplitude of P3 at CPz was entered into a 2 (Prime Condition:
emotion regulation and neutral) 2 (Valence: positive and negative) 2 (Magnitude: large and small) ANOVA. The main effect of
Prime Condition was not significant (F(1, 29) ¼ 1.47, P ¼ 0.24); priming emotion regulation (19.60 mV) did not elicit smaller P3 amplitudes
than priming neutral idioms (19.14 mV) (Figure 4). The main effect of
Valence was significant (F(1, 29) ¼ 15.90, P < 0.001, 2p ¼ 0.35); the P3
was larger when the outcome valence was positive (20.53 mV) and
smaller when the outcome valence was negative (18.21 mV).
The main effect of Magnitude was significant (F(1, 29) ¼ 35.35,
P < 0.001, 2p ¼ 0.55); the P3 was larger when the outcome magnitude
was large (22.04 mV) than when it was small (16.66 mV). The
interactions of Prime Condition Valence, Prime Condition Magnitude, Valence Magnitude and Prime Condition Valence Magnitude were not significant (P values > 0.05).
DISCUSSION
The present study investigated the impact of priming emotion regulation on emotional experiences and ERP responses to outcome presentations. Consistent with our hypotheses, priming emotion regulation
effectively reduced subjective emotional experiences and the amplitudes of the FRN elicited by outcome feedback. Also consistent with
our hypotheses, the P3 was not affected by priming emotion
regulation.
Experimental manipulation and emotional experience
The idioms used in the present study to prime emotion regulation
were deeply rooted in Chinese social and cultural norms, which
either advise people to calm down when encountering any consequence or encourage people to accept irrevocable outcomes with a
wide vision in unpredictable circumstances. Emotion regulation was
thus primed in the form of highly valued norms before the processing
of outcome feedback. We suggest that the primed attitudes and values
implicitly reduce the emotional salience of outcome feedback, thus
attenuating the concomitant emotional experience. This matching
task was disguised as a measure of language capability in task instruction, and the participants were rewarded for each correctly matching
idiom. This experimental manipulation ensured that the modulation
of the subjective emotional experience was the result of implicit emotion regulation, which is defined as the processes of affective regulation
that are initiated without consciousness and effort, and run to completion without monitoring (Gyurak et al., 2011; Koole and
Rothermund, 2011).
The subjective ratings revealed that gains and losses led to positive
and negative emotional experiences, respectively. More importantly,
priming emotion regulation led to a significant reduction of subjective
emotional experiences compared with priming neutral idioms. This
finding is consistent with previous investigations, in which priming
emotion control leads to less anger experience in response to a laboratory anger provocation (Mauss et al., 2007b). Similarly, Williams et al.
(2009) showed that unobtrusive priming of a reappraisal goal reduces
emotional reactivity (as indexed by decreased heart rate) in an anxietyeliciting task compared with the control group with neutral priming.
In the present study, the participants were instructed to match the
meaning of Chinese four-character idioms before the gambling task.
Not only the negative emotional experiences induced by losses but also
the positive emotional experiences to gains were reduced by emotion
regulation prime, which was consistent with our previous study applying explicit emotion regulation (Yang et al., 2013). This result suggests
that implicit regulation is effective in alleviating both positive and
negative emotions. In addition, the modulation effect of implicit emotion regulation on the subjective emotional experiences was stronger
for numerically large outcomes than for small outcomes regardless
of outcome valence. This result indicates that implicit emotion
regulation is of great value for modulating excessive emotions that
Implicit emotion regulation affects outcome evaluation
SCAN (2015)
829
Fig. 4 The grand average ERPs evoked by the presentation of outcomes at the CPz recording site and scalp distribution when the corresponding P3 reached the maximum.
are induced by great gains or losses, which are detrimental to mental
health.
implicit emotion regulation on both motivational salience and emotional investment of outcome feedback.
The FRN component
In our previous study, the participants were instructed to evaluate an
outcome in a greater context, and consider gains and losses as inevitable in each round of gambling (Yang et al., 2013). The application of
this cognitive reappraisal strategy significantly modulated the motivational salience of current outcomes, and the FRN amplitude was
reduced accordingly (Yang et al., 2013). In the present study, reduced
FRN amplitude was also observed in the condition of priming emotion
regulation. As mentioned above, we suggest that priming idioms that
were related to emotion regulation implicitly reduced the motivational
salience of any financial outcomes compared with priming neutral
idioms. This hypothesis was confirmed by the decreased FRN amplitude, which is widely regarded as a label of the motivational significance of an ongoing event (Gehring and Willoughby, 2002; Yeung and
Sanfey, 2004; Yeung et al., 2005; Holroyd et al., 2008a). A decreased
FRN in company with attenuated emotional experience was observed
when the participants regulated emotions to outcome feedback both
explicitly (in Yang et al., 2013) and implicitly (in this study). The
similar changing patterns of the FRN amplitude and the emotional
experience indicate that the FRN may be sensitive to emotional investment in outcome feedback. This viewpoint is also supported by the
evidence that the FRN is sensitive to emotional levels (Hajcak et al.,
2004; Larson et al., 2006; Wiswede et al., 2009; Shackman et al., 2011;
Santesso et al., 2012). On the contrary, the relationship between emotional experience and the P3 amplitude did not show stable patterns
(discussed later). Thus, we suggest that the amplitude of the FRN is
sensitive to emotional investment in current outcomes. In short, we
suggest that the altered FRN in this study reflected the impact of
The P3 component
The result that the P3 amplitude increased proportionally to both the
amount of gains received and losses incurred replicated previous findings (such as, Yeung and Sanfey, 2004; Polezzi et al., 2010).
Interestingly, priming idioms related to emotion regulation did not
influence the P3 responses. Our recent study has shown that explicit
emotion regulation reduced the P3 amplitude of both gains and losses
(Yang et al., 2013). Seeing that the P3 amplitude reflects the allocation
of cognitive resources (Polich, 1987, 2007; Molnár, 1999), these results
suggest that during decision-making, explicit emotion regulation is
cognitively demanding and requires the allocation of cognitive resources, while implicit emotion regulation is evoked without the cost
of cognitive resources. Similarly, Mauss et al. (2007a) observed that
compared with priming emotion expression, the priming of emotion
control reduces negative emotion experience without physiological
cost. Together, these findings verified that implicit emotion regulation
could be executed without conscious effort, supporting the dualprocess framework of explicit and implicit emotion regulation
(Gyurak et al., 2011).
Recent ERP studies have proposed a two-step sequential model of
outcome processing, including an early coarse detection of outcome
information (indexed by the FRN) and a late deliberate evaluation
stage (indexed by the P3) (Wu and Zhou, 2009; Philiastides et al.,
2010; Zhang et al., 2014). The comparison between this study and
our previous research (Yang et al., 2013) reveals that while explicit
emotion regulation influences both the FRN and the P3, implicit regulation selectively affects the FRN. These results support the idea that
the early stage of outcome evaluation is more susceptible to automatic
unconscious psychological factors (Lebreton et al., 2009). Also, they
830
SCAN (2015)
are in line with the previous finding that implicit regulation modulates
the early stage of emotional face processing indicated by the ERP
components N1 and P1 (Dennis et al., 2009) and may help with understanding the difference between explicit and implicit regulation
strategies.
Concluding remarks
To sum up, this study revealed that priming social and cultural norms
of emotion regulation effectively influenced emotional experiences and
the FRN elicited by outcome feedback. In contrast, the P3 following
outcome feedback was not affected by implicit emotion regulation. In
addition, the modulation effect of implicit emotion regulation on the
subjective emotional experiences was stronger for large outcomes than
for small ones. These results indicated that during the process of outcome evaluation, implicit emotion regulation could significantly
modulate emotion responses, especially for excessive emotions, without the cost of cognitive resources.
The focus of the present study was discovering the significance of
primed Chinese social and cultural norms of emotion regulation that
are condensed into the form of Chinese four-character idiom historically. In traditional Chinese cultures, there are a lot more of such
Chinese four-character idioms that are highly commendatory sayings,
which also emphasize the significance of emotion regulation. These
idioms are supposed to have similar modulating effects on various
emotional responses as on those elicited by outcome feedback.
Future research is needed to test this speculation. In addition, studies
are also awaited to compare the priming effect of such idioms with
habitual use of them to reappraise emotional events, both of which
belong to the category of implicit emotion regulation (Gyurak et al.,
2011). These studies would provide novel insight into implicit emotion
regulation.
Conflict of Interest
None declared.
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