Citation

Herbert C, Deutsch R, Platte P, Pauli P. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 2013; 8(6): 654-661.

Affiliation

Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy University of Würzburg Marcusstr. 9-11 97070 Würzburg Germany Phone number: +49 (0) 931 31 81981 Fax number: +49 (0) 931 31 82733, cornelia.herbert@psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/scan/nss043

PMID

22490924

Abstract

This EEG study investigated if negating one's emotion results in paradoxical effects or leads to effective emotional down-regulation. Healthy participants were asked to down-regulate their emotions to happy and fearful faces by using negated emotional cue words (e.g., no fun, no fear). Cue words were congruent with the emotion depicted in the face and presented prior to each face. Stimuli were presented in blocks of happy and fearful faces. Blocks of passive stimulus viewing served as control condition. Active regulation reduced amplitudes of early ERPs (EPN, but not N170) and the late positive potential (LPP) for fearful faces. A fronto-central negativity peaking at about 250 ms after target face onset showed larger amplitude modulations during down-regulation of fearful and happy faces. Behaviorally, negating was more associated with reappraisal than with suppression. Our results suggest that in an emotional context negation processing could be quite effective for emotional down-regulation but that its effects depend on the type of the negated emotion (pleasant vs. unpleasant). Results are discussed in the context of dual process models of cognition and emotion regulation.

Language: en