Emotion regulation of fear and disgust: differential effects of reappraisal and suppression

ABSTRACT

Although excessive fear has been central to traditional conceptualisations of the anxiety disorders, recent research suggests that disgust may also play a role in the development of some anxiety disorders. While dysregulation of emotion may confer risk for the development of anxiety disorders, it remains unclear if there are differences in the extent to which fear and disgust can be effectively regulated. To fill this important gap in the literature, unselected participants (N = 95) experienced fear or disgust via video exposure, and they were instructed to employ either reappraisal or suppression to regulate their emotional experience while viewing the videos. For those exposed to fear-relevant content, change in emotional distress did not significantly differ between those that suppressed and those that reappraised. However, significantly less emotional distress was observed for those that reappraised compared to those that suppressed when exposed to disgust-relevant content. Although physiological arousal varied over time as a function of the emotional content of the videos, it did not vary as a function of emotion regulation strategy employed. These findings suggest that reappraisal may be especially effective in regulating verbal distress when exposed to disgusting cues in the environment. The implications of these findings for the treatment of anxiety disorders that are characterised by excessive disgust reactions will be discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Disgust
• fear
• emotion regulation
• suppression
• reappraisal
• anxiety

Notes

1 Post-hoc power analyses using the G*Power analysis program indicated that we had greater than a .80 power to detect effect sizes as small as d = .50 for the comparison between suppression and reappraisal in the fear and disgust video conditions.

2 This interaction is described in the previous section of the results showing that fear ratings were higher than disgust ratings in the fear video condition and disgust ratings were higher than fear ratings in the disgust video condition.

3 Despite including gender as a covariate in the analysis, it cannot be completely ruled out that differences in the gender distribution between the two film conditions may be partly responsible for the differential findings. To further address this potential confound, we reran the analysis including gender as an additional factor and examining interaction effects including this variable. Gender did not interact with any of the other factors. Most notably is that the Gender × Emotion Video [F(1, 87) = 0.01, p = .91, partial  = .00] and the Gender × Emotion Regulation [F(1, 87) = 0.54, p = .46, partial  = .00] condition was not significant. Similarly, gender did not interact with the other factors when examining physiology. Most notably is that the Gender × Emotion Video [F(1, 68) = 0.12, p = .72, partial  = .00] and the Gender × Emotion Regulation [F(1, 68) = 0.01, p = .89, partial  = .00] condition was not significant.