Interpersonal emotion regulation and physiological synchrony: cognitive reappraisal versus expressive suppression

ABSTRACT

The present study aimed to explore the effectiveness of two typical intrapersonal strategies (cognitive reappraisal, CR; expressive suppression, ES) on interpersonal emotion regulation (IER), and uncover the physiological synchrony pattern underlying this. A sample of 90 friend dyads (N = 180) was randomly assigned to the CR, the ES, or the control group. In each dyad, the target underwent a negative emotional task (induce sadness by recalling a negative event), and the regulator was assigned to implement the CR strategy, the ES strategy, or no action to down-regulate the targets’ negative emotions. Self-reported results showed that compared to the control group, both CR and ES strategies decreased the targets’ negative emotions, and increased the targets’ positive emotions, indicating a successful IER effect. And the ECG results revealed that relative to the control condition, both CR and ES strategies evoked stronger physiological synchrony (heart rate synchrony and heart rate variation synchrony) during the emotion regulation stage of IER. Overall, these findings demonstrated the similar efficacy of reappraisal and suppression strategies implemented by the regulators to improve the targets’ negative emotions, and suggested that the physiological synchrony might have an important relational meaning during the IER process.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpersonal emotion regulation
• Cognitive reappraisal
• Expressive suppression
• Physiological synchronisation

Acknowledgements

Yanmei Wang conceived of the project and designed the experiments. Yinzhi Shi implemented the experiment and performed data analyses. Yanmei Wang wrote the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The data have not been used in prior published or in press manuscripts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Scientific and Technological Innovation 2030 – the major project of the Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence Technology (2021ZD0200500), the Humanity and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China (20YJA190008).