On the dynamics of implicit emotion regulation: Counter-regulation after remembering events of high but not of low emotional intensity

Abstract

Valence biases in attention allocation were assessed after remembering positive or negative personal events that were either still emotionally hot or to which the person had already adapted psychologically. Differences regarding the current state of psychological adjustment were manipulated experimentally by instructing participants to recall distant vs. recent events (Experiment 1) or affectively hot events vs. events to which the person had accommodated already (Experiment 2). Valence biases in affective processing were measured with a valence search task. Processes of emotional counter-regulation (i.e., attention allocation to stimuli of opposite valence to the emotional event) were elicited by remembering affectively hot events, whereas congruency effects (i.e., attention allocation to stimuli of the same valence as the emotional event) were obtained for events for which a final appraisal had already been established. The results of our study help to resolve conflicting findings from the literature regarding congruent vs. incongruent effects of remembering emotional events on affective processing. We discuss implications of our findings for the conception of emotions and for the dynamics of emotion regulation processes.

Keywords:

• Counter-regulation
• Implicit emotion regulation
• Affective processing
• Valence biases
• Emotional intensity
• Coping

Notes

¹ We use the term explicit emotion regulation to denote processes that are initiated strategically and are resource-demanding, slow and (sometimes) inefficient. Suppressing emotional expressions might not produce corresponding changes in emotional feeling, and even reappraisals of a situation might not always produce corresponding changes in experienced emotion as long as it is obvious that the reappraisal has been fabricated. Explicit emotion regulation is often driven by hedonic needs, and some forms of strategic emotion regulation have been shown to be beneficial for well-being (e.g., reappraisal, Gross & John, 2003; affective savouring, Larsen, 2000; McMakin, Siegle, & Shirk, 2011). Implicit emotion-regulation processes, on the other hand, are defined as occurring spontaneously and automatically; they do not draw on cognitive resources and have the advantage that they change the accessibility of information without creating awareness of any bias in information processing that might undermine the credibility of the resulting beliefs and appraisals (Koole & Rothermund, 2011). Implicit and explicit emotion regulation are not regarded as mutually exclusive but rather constitute complementary processes contributing to an efficient regulation of action, motivation and affect (Gyurak et al., 2011; Koole, 2009; Rothermund, 2011b).

² At first sight, counter-regulation might appear to be opposed to an affective savouring of positive emotions and experiences. This is not the case: An automatically increased sensitivity in the processing of negative information does not change affective experiences directly, nor does it interfere with strategic attempts at making the most of a positive experience. Importantly, however, counter-regulation during positive emotional states might sensitise the individual to potential negative implications of positive indulgence (if they exist!), for example, important obligations might be missed, other people might become envious or might view the person as conceited (e.g., in case of boasting too much). As long as savouring a positive experience is not associated with any negative implications, however, counter-regulation does not interfere with positive experiences in any way.

³ Including this participant did not affect the test of the central hypothesis of the study, that is, the effect of temporal distance on counter-regulation was significant with and without this participant.

⁴ For one of the negative words (“precipitancy”), frequency and valence extremity ratings were not available. Regarding arousal, there was, however, a significant difference, t(45) = 39.23, p < .001, indicating that negative stimuli were more arousing than positive stimuli. To eliminate this confound, we reran all analyses of valence asymmetries in the search task after excluding the most arousing negative stimuli and the least arousing positive stimuli from our data-set so that positive and negative stimuli did not differ according to arousal anymore, t(30) = 1.76, p = .089. The pattern of results remained the same for all experiments even after controlling for differences in arousal (the critical interaction effect between state of adaptation and counter-regulation was as follows: F(1,55) = 6.87, p = .006 (one-tailed) for Exp. 1, and F(1,78) = 10.32, p = .001 (one-tailed) for Exp. 2). The reported effects thus reflect pure effects of valence rather than asymmetries in attending to arousing vs. less arousing stimuli.

⁵ Implicit affect regulation has been associated with the “implicit self as agent” (Koole & Jostmann, 2004; Kuhl, 2000) and in turn with right hemispheric processing (Baumann, Kuhl, & Kazén, 2005; Keenan, Nelson, O'Connor, Pascual-Leone, 2001; Ranganath & Paller, 1999). Assuming that counter-regulation reflects a process of the “implicit self”, one would expect stronger counter-regulation effects for words presented on the left side of the screen. Our data allow only for an exploratory assessment of effects of lateralisation since we did not control for head movements and also did not centre the words at a specific absolute position on the screen (instead, words were always presented closely to the fixation cross). However, testing for effects of lateralisation supports the proposed hypothesis: The effect of adjustment on counter-regulation was more pronounced for words appearing on the left side of the screen, F(1,124) = 8.63, p < .01, , than for words on the right side, F < 1. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this analysis.

⁶ We would like to thank the action editor of this paper, Dr Peter Kuppens, for suggesting this possibility.

Additional information

Funding

The research of Klaus Rothermund and Dirk Wentura reported in this article was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number DFG RO 1272/2-3].