Examining the effects of emotion regulation on the ERP response to highly negative social stigmas

ABSTRACT

In order to determine if highly negative stigma is a more salient cue than other negative emotional, non-stigmatized cues, participants underwent electroencephalography while passively viewing or actively regulating their emotional response to images of highly negative stigmatized (e.g., homeless individuals, substance abusers) or highly negative non-stigmatized (e.g., a man holding a gun, an injured person) individuals. Event-related potential (ERP) analyses focused on the N2 (associated with detecting novelty), the early positive potential (associated with processing emotion), and a sustained late positive potential (associated with modulating regulatory goals). A salience effect for highly negative stigma was revealed in the early positive potential, with higher magnitude ERP responses to images of highly negative stigmatized as compared to highly negative non-stigmatized individuals 355 ms poststimulus onset. Moreover, the amplitude of this effect was predicted by individual differences in implicit bias. Our results also demonstrated that the late positivity response was not modulated by regulatory goals (passively view versus to reappraise) for images of highly negative stigmatized individuals, but was for images of highly negative, non-stigmatized individuals (replicating previous findings). Our findings suggest that the neural response to highly negative stigma is salient and rigid.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion regulation
• social stigma
• ERP

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ IAPS images used: 2100, 2110, 2120, 2130, 2205, 2220, 2221, 2410, 2490, 2661, 2690, 2691, 2700, 2810, 2900, 3180, 3220, 3230, 3280, 3530, 4621, 4631, 6211, 6212, 6243, 6244, 6510, 6530, 6540, 6560, 6561, 6570, 6830, 8230, 8480, 9041, 9042, 9160, 9220, 9230, 9270, 9402, 9415, 9417, 9421, 9430, 9452, 9520, 9530, and 9700.

Additional information

Funding

The funding support for this study was provided by NRSA training grant 1F32AG034039 (awarded to ACK) and NIMH grant MH080833 (awarded to EAK). This research was conducted while EAK was a Searle Scholar.