Previous studies have shown that alertness is closely related to executive control function, but its impact on components of post-error adjustment is unknown. This study applied the Attentional Networks Test and the Four-choice Flanker task with three response stimulus intervals (RSIs) to explore the correlation between alertness and post-error adjustment. The results showed a significant negative correlation between the alertness and post-error slowing (PES) under 200ms RSI and post-error improvement in accuracy (PIA) under 700ms RSI and 1200ms RSI. The PES under 200ms RSI in the low alerting group was significantly larger than in other groups. The PIA under 1200ms RSI in the high alerting group was significantly smaller than in other groups. This study revealed the effects of alertness on different processing components of post-error adjustment. The control strategies utilized by individuals with high and low levels of alertness differed in preparation for performance monitoring. Alertness improved post-error response speed in a task-unspecific manner, but not post-error adaptation.
People with high working memory (WM) capacity tend to respond proactively and experience a decrease in undesired emotions, implying the potential influence of WM training on emotional responses. Although training emotional WM could enhance emotional control, the training also improves emotional response itself. Thus, the far-transfer effects of non-emotional WM training on emotional responses remain an open question. In the present study, two experiments were conducted to detect these effects. The Preliminary experiment matched the expectations of the gains of the training tasks between the experimental and active control groups (n = 33). In Experiments 1 and 2, participants performed 7-day and 15-day training procedures, respectively. Results indicated that after a 7-day training, non-emotional WM training (n = 17) marginally reduced individuals' emotional responses compared with the active control group (n = 18); importantly, this improvement became significant after a 15-day training (n(WM training) = 20, n(active control) = 18). A combination analysis for Experiments 1 and 2 showed that training gains on WM performance were significantly related to reduced emotional responses (r = -0.359), indicating a dosage effect. Therefore, non-emotional WM training provides a safe and effective way to enhance adaptive emotional responses.
Many psychological disorders are characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation. As a result, finding an effective way of emotional regulation has significant implications for people′s understanding of emotional regulation mechanism and for the treatment of psychological disorders. Voluntary emotion regulation typically refers to effortful and controlled processes based on consciously intended strategies. Many previous studies have shown that voluntary emotion regulation is effective in reducing individuals′ negative emotional responses. However, its regulatory effects always come with the cognitive costs that limit its clinical application. Recently, researchers have begun to pay attention to automatic emotion regulation that can reduce the negative emotional responses without cognitive resource consumption. Automatic emotion regulation (AER) is characterized by goal-driven changes to human emotions without a conscious decision to do so and without engaging in deliberate control. This characteristic has been suggested to be critical for the psychological well-being of human beings. Though the regulatory effects of AER have been suggested to be effective and cost-free, its research methods and paradigms have not yet to be systematically elaborated to date. After systematic review of existing studies of AER, we consider that automatic goal pursuit constitutes the common theoretical foundation of AER. Early studies mainly used individual differences method to explore the relationship between spontaneous emotion-regulatory effects and physiological measurement scores. These studies found that emotion regulation can spontaneous occur without explicit instructions and individuals′ abilities of spontaneous emotion regulation are closely associated with their scores on emotion-regulation-related scales. With the development of AER research, several experimental paradigms for AER are proposed and used constantly. Here, we summarized three types of AER tasks based on these existing literature: sentence unscrambling task, word matching task, and implementation intention paradigm. Then we compared the manipulation and the behavioral and physiological response of AER under these three conditions. The sentence unscrambling task/word matching task offers an implicit means to activate particular goals, motivations, or values, and thus circumvents the problems that explicit instructions can provoke. Implementation intention paradigm can help people form a potential link between situational cues and emotion-regulatory goals. By forming implementation intentions, people can strategically switch from conscious and effortful control of their goal-directed behaviors to automatic control of them by forming situational cue and goal contingencies. Therefore, compared with sentence unscrambling task and word matching task, implementation intention paradigm can help individuals to make conscious emotion regulation without consuming cognitive resources. More importantly, the three AER tasks may share the same internal mechanism: automatic priming of emotion-regulatory goals. We hope that our findings can shed light on the clinical application of AER in psychological therapy. Based on the findings, we further propose some concrete suggestions in combining AER with psychological therapy and provide a new idea for the treatment of mental illnesses.
Response errors often cause individuals to slow down their subsequent reactions (posterror slowing [PES]). Despite intensive investigations on PES, the adaptive nature of PES remains unresolved. Here, we systematically examined this issue by manipulating response-stimulus intervals (RSIs) and examining their influence on behaviors and neural dynamics of PES. Behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) measures were recorded while male and female human participants performed a four-choice flanker task as RSIs were manipulated. Behaviorally, PES showed maladaptive features at short RSIs but some adaptive features at long RSIs. EEG results indicated that RSIs did not affect basic error-related processing, indexed by the same pattern in the contrasts between flanker errors and correct responses on the error-related negativity (ERN), error positivity (Pe), or theta band, no matter at short or long RSIs. However, RSIs significantly influenced postflanker error attentional adjustment, motor inhibition, and sensory sensitivity. At short RSIs, compared with postcorrect trials, postflanker error trials elicited larger beta band power and smaller P1 amplitude but did not affect alpha band power, suggesting that motor processing was inhibited, and subsequent sensory processing was impaired, but no attentional adjustment occurred. By contrast, at long RSIs, postflanker error trials led to smaller alpha and beta band power but did not affect P1 amplitude, indicating that attentional adjustment but not motor inhibition occurred, and sensory processing was not impaired. Together with behavioral results, the current study demonstrated that PES was adaptive at long RSIs but maladaptive at short RSIs. We further discuss the role of central resources in the adaptability of PES. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
The emotional habituation plays an important role in individuals' adaptation to the environment.The present study explored the brain's emotional habituation to positive and negative pictures of diverse emotional intensities.Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in two different experimental sessions, for highly positive (HP), mildly positive (MP) and neutral picture and for highly negative (HN), mildly negative (MN) and neutral picture.Subjects were asked to perform a standard/deviant categorization task, irrespective of emotionality of the deviants.The behavior results showed that the arousal ratings for HP stimuli decreased significantly with stimulus repetition.In addition, the ERP results displayed earlier N1 peak latencies with stimulus repetition in the positive session.Furthermore, the size of the emotion effect, which was computed by the emotion-neutral differences, decreased significantly for HP and MP stimuli with stimulus repetition in P3 amplitudes.Conversely, the current study failed to observe an emotional habituation effect to negative stimuli in any behavioral or ERP indexes.These results suggest that the humans' emotional reactions to positive stimuli, irrespective of the emotional intensity, are susceptible to habituation, irrespective of information processing stage.However, the humans' emotional reactions to negative stimuli are resistant to habituation, irrespective of the emotional intensities of the stimuli and the information processing stage.This valence-specific habituation effect is independent of the emotional intensity of the stimuli.
Abstract Feedback-related negativity (FRN) is believed to encode reward prediction error (RPE), a term describing whether the outcome is better or worse than expected. However, some studies suggest that it may reflect unsigned prediction error (UPE) instead. Some disagreement remains as to whether FRN is sensitive to the interaction of outcome valence and prediction error (PE) or merely responsive to the absolute size of PE. Moreover, few studies have compared FRN in appetitive and aversive domains to clarify the valence effect or examine PE’s quantitative modulation. To investigate the impact of valence and parametrical PE on FRN, we varied the prediction and feedback magnitudes within a probabilistic learning task in valence (gain and loss domains, Experiment 1) and non-valence contexts (pure digits, Experiment 2). Experiment 3 was identical to Experiment 1 except that some blocks emphasized outcome valence, while others highlighted predictive accuracy. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed a UPE encoder; Experiment 3 found an RPE encoder when valence was emphasized and a UPE encoder when predictive accuracy was highlighted. In this investigation, we demonstrate that FRN is sensitive to outcome valence and expectancy violation, exhibiting a preferential response depending on the dimension that is emphasized.
We investigated if emotion regulation can be improved through self-regulation training on non-emotional brain regions, as well as how to change the brain networks implicated in this process. During the training period, the participants were instructed to up-regulate their right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) activity according to real-time functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) neurofeedback signals, and there was no emotional element. The results showed that the training significantly increased emotion regulation, resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) within the emotion regulation network (ERN) and frontoparietal network (FPN), and rsFC between the ERN and amygdala; however, training did not influence the rsFC between the FPN and the amygdala. However, self-regulation training on rDLPFC significantly improved emotion regulation and generally increased the rsFCs within the networks; the rsFC between the ERN and amygdala was also selectively increased. The present study also described a safe approach that may improve emotion regulation through self-regulation training on non-emotional brain regions.
The timing dynamics of regulating negative emotion with expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal were investigated in a Chinese sample. Event-Related Potentials were recorded while subjects were required to view, suppress emotion expression to, or reappraise emotional pictures. The results showed a similar reduction in self-reported negative emotion during both strategies. Additionally, expressive suppression elicited larger amplitudes than reappraisal in central-frontal P3 component (340–480 ms). More importantly, the Late Positive Potential (LPP) amplitudes were decreased in each 200 ms of the 800–1600 ms time intervals during suppression vs. viewing conditions. In contrast, LPP amplitudes were similar for reappraisal and viewing conditions in all the time windows, except for the decreased amplitudes during reappraisal in the 1400–1600 ms. The LPP (but not P3) amplitudes were positively related to negative mood ratings, whereas the amplitudes of P3, rather than LPP, predict self-reported expressive suppression. These results suggest that expressive suppression decreases emotion responding more rapidly than reappraisal, at the cost of greater cognitive resource involvements in Chinese individuals.
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