Yang Qian, Pourtois Gilles
Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu 610066, China.
Cognitive & Affective Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Brain Sci. 2022 Apr 27;12(5):564. doi: 10.3390/brainsci12050564.
Negative affect facilitates conflict processing. Here we sought to assess whether symmetrically, its downregulation by means of reappraisal could lower it. To this end, 105 participants performed the confound-minimized Stroop task eliciting negative affect that was followed by a simple reward-related visual discrimination task. Conflict processing was induced with the former task. Half of them (experimental group) were instructed to use this second task to downregulate negative affect arising from the Stroop task. The other half (control group) did not receive these appraisal-related instructions. Group comparisons showed that negative affect and the conflict effect were similar for these two groups. However, when we added and modeled the subjective ratings related to emotion regulation, we found that conflict processing significantly improved for participants who reported using reappraisal spontaneously, and this gain occurred irrespective of negative affect. These results suggest that reappraisal can influence conflict processing but this change does not depend on negative affect.
消极情绪有助于冲突处理。在此，我们试图评估通过重新评价对称地下调消极情绪是否能够降低消极情绪。为此，105名参与者进行了将混淆最小化的斯特鲁普任务，该任务引发了消极情绪，随后进行了一个简单的与奖励相关的视觉辨别任务。前一个任务诱导了冲突处理。其中一半（实验组）被指示使用第二个任务来下调由斯特鲁普任务产生的消极情绪。另一半（对照组）没有收到这些与重新评价相关的指示。组间比较表明，这两组的消极情绪和冲突效应相似。然而，当我们添加并对与情绪调节相关的主观评分进行建模时，我们发现，对于那些报告自发使用重新评价的参与者，冲突处理显著改善，并且这种改善与消极情绪无关。这些结果表明，重新评价可以影响冲突处理，但这种变化并不取决于消极情绪。
