scholarly journals Emotion regulation of social exclusion: a cross-cultural study

Author(s):  
Zhenhong He ◽  
Nils Muhlert ◽  
Rebecca Elliott

AbstractSocial exclusion is harmful to basic human needs. Emotion regulation represents a potential coping strategy. As culture can influence how people react and regulate their emotions, this study examined whether emotional reaction and regulation in response to social exclusion differ between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. A total of 80 college students, half White (n = 40, recruited in Manchester, UK) and half East Asian (n = 40, recruited in Shenzhen, China) viewed social exclusion pictures expressed by same-race or other-race characters. Both groups of participants viewed these pictures under no-reappraisal (passive viewing) and reappraisal (reinterpretation) conditions. Participants rated their vicarious negative emotional experience after each picture presentation. Results showed that both White and East Asian participants expressed greater negative emotion and showed stronger emotion regulation effects when facing own-race social exclusion, i.e., the “own-race bias”. In addition, White participants were more capable of regulating the negative emotions elicited by social exclusion compared to East Asian participants. Findings highlight the importance of considering the role of culture in emotional reaction to and emotion regulation of social exclusion, which may help the development of appropriate interventions across diverse populations.

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhenhong He ◽  
Zhenli Liu ◽  
Jun Zhao ◽  
Rebecca Elliott ◽  
Dandan Zhang

AbstractBackgroundGrowing evidence has indicated that right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC) is critical in down-regulating emotional responses to social exclusion, and that depression is accompanied by social emotional dysregulation associated with reduced lateral prefrontal engagement. This study used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to examine whether stimulating RVLPFC could improve emotional down-regulation of social exclusion in individuals with high depressive mood (DM).MethodsA total of 96 high and 94 low DM individuals received active or sham tDCS while viewing social exclusion or individual negative pictures under no-reappraisal (passive viewing) and reappraisal conditions. Participants rate their negative emotional experience following the presentation of each image. Pupil diameter and visual fixation duration were also recorded during the task.ResultsIt was found that tDCS-activated RVLPFC induced a stronger regulation effect on social exclusion than individual negative emotions. The effect of tDCS on regulation of social exclusion was more pronounced in low v. high DM individuals.ConclusionsThese findings demonstrate the specific role of RVLPFC on social emotion regulation, which has implications for refining target areas for the treatment of social emotion dysregulation in depression. However the findings do not suggest that high DM individuals benefit from a single-tDCS session on the emotion regulation of social exclusion. Thus we suggest to use multiple tDCS sessions or transcranial magnetic stimulation to further explore the therapeutic proposal in the future.


Author(s):  
Hooria Jazaieri ◽  
Amanda S. Morrison ◽  
James J. Gross

It has widely been acknowledged that many psychological disorders involve difficulties with emotion regulation. However, the majority of this work has focused on difficulties regulating negative emotion. Using the process model of emotion regulation as a guiding framework, this chapter illustrates the regulation of positive emotional experience in social anxiety disorder. For many people, interpersonal situations are some of the most meaningful and pleasurable in life. However, for individuals with social anxiety disorder, interpersonal situations often are more stressful and terrifying than they are meaningful and pleasurable. As a consequence, individuals with social anxiety disorder have poorer relationships and fewer social connections. This chapter first briefly reviews general features of emotion regulation and then considers emotion and emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder specifically. We then summarize the role of positive emotion and the regulation of positive emotional experience in social anxiety disorder. The chapter also discusses implications for assessment and treatment.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Sun ◽  
Disa Sauter

Getting old is generally seen as unappealing, yet aging confers considerable advantages in several psychological domains (North & Fiske, 2015). In particular, older adults are better off emotionally than younger adults, with aging associated with the so-called “age advantages,” that is, more positive and less negative emotional experiences (Carstensen et al., 2011). Although the age advantages are well established, it is less clear whether they occur under conditions of prolonged stress. In a recent study, Carstensen et al (2020) demonstrated that the age advantages persist during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that older adults are able to utilise cognitive and behavioural strategies to ameliorate even sustained stress. Here, we build on Carstensen and colleagues’ work with two studies. In Study 1, we provide a large-scale test of the robustness of Carstensen and colleagues’ finding that older individuals experience more positive and less negative emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We measured positive and negative emotions along with age information in 23,629 participants in 63 countries in April-May 2020. In Study 2, we provide a comparison of the age advantages using representative samples collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that older people experience less negative emotion than younger people during the prolonged stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the advantage of older adults was diminished during the pandemic, pointing to a likely role of older adults use of situation selection strategies (Charles, 2010).


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (15-16) ◽  
pp. 2611-2629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Garofalo ◽  
Belén López-Pérez ◽  
Michaela Gummerum ◽  
Yaniv Hanoch ◽  
Maya Tamir

Sexual offenders typically experience more negative emotions and greater difficulties in regulating emotions than non-offenders. However, limited data exist on what sexual offenders want to feel (i.e., their emotion goals). Notably, emotion goals play a key role in emotion regulation and contribute to emotional experience. The present study tested whether sexual offenders ( N = 31) reported higher scores for negative emotion goals and lower scores for positive emotion goals, compared with general offenders ( N = 26) and non-offenders ( N = 26). In addition, we tested whether sexual offenders differed from the other two groups in their perceived pleasantness and perceived utility of emotions. Sexual offenders reported greater scores for the emotion goal of sadness, and lower scores for the emotion goal of excitement, compared with both general offenders and non-offenders. State and trait levels of these emotions could not fully account for these differences. Furthermore, sexual offenders reported lower perceived pleasantness for sadness than general offenders and lower perceived pleasantness for excitement compared with both other groups. Finally, sexual offenders reported greater perceived utility of sadness than non-offenders. These novel findings and their implications for research and interventions are discussed in the context of sexual offenders’ emotional dysfunction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Young ◽  
Christina Sandman ◽  
Michelle Craske

Emotion regulation skills develop substantially across adolescence, a period characterized by emotional challenges and developing regulatory neural circuitry. Adolescence is also a risk period for the new onset of anxiety and depressive disorders, psychopathologies which have long been associated with disruptions in regulation of positive and negative emotions. This paper reviews the current understanding of the role of disrupted emotion regulation in adolescent anxiety and depression, describing findings from self-report, behavioral, peripheral psychophysiological, and neural measures. Self-report studies robustly identified associations between emotion dysregulation and adolescent anxiety and depression. Findings from behavioral and psychophysiological studies are mixed, with some suggestion of specific impairments in reappraisal in anxiety. Results from neuroimaging studies broadly implicate altered functioning of amygdala-prefrontal cortical circuitries, although again, findings are mixed regarding specific patterns of altered neural functioning. Future work may benefit from focusing on designs that contrast effects of specific regulatory strategies, and isolate changes in emotional regulation from emotional reactivity. Approaches to improve treatments based on empirical evidence of disrupted emotion regulation in adolescents are also discussed. Future intervention studies might consider training and measurement of specific strategies in adolescents to better understand the role of emotion regulation as a treatment mechanism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yannick A. Balk ◽  
Marieke A. Adriaanse ◽  
Denise T.D. de Ridder ◽  
Catharine Evers

Performing under high pressure is an emotional experience. Hence, the use of emotion regulation strategies may prove to be highly effective in preventing choking under pressure. Using a golf putting task, we investigated the role of arousal on declined sport performance under pressure (pilot study) and the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies in alleviating choking under pressure (main study). The pilot study showed that pressure resulted in decreased performance and this effect was partially mediated by increased arousal. The main study, a field study, showed that whereas the choking effect was observed in the control condition, reappraisal and, particularly, distraction were effective emotion regulation strategies in helping people to cope instead of choke under pressure. These findings suggest that interventions that aim to prevent choking under pressure could benefit from including emotion regulation strategies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin K. Moran ◽  
Adam J. Culbreth ◽  
Deanna M. Barch

While recent evidence has pointed to disturbances in emotion regulation strategy use in schizophrenia, few studies have examined how these regulation strategies relate to emotionality and social behavior in daily life. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), we investigated the relationship between emotion regulation, emotional experience, and social interaction in the daily lives of individuals with schizophrenia. Participants ( N = 30) used mobile phones to complete online questionnaires reporting their daily emotional experience and social interaction. Participants also completed self-report measures of habitual emotion regulation. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that self-reported use of cognitive reappraisal and savoring of emotional experiences were related to greater positive emotion in daily life. In contrast, self-reported suppression was related to greater negative emotion, reduced positive emotion, and reduced social interaction in daily life. These findings suggest that individual differences in habitual emotion regulation strategy usage have important relationships to everyday emotional and social experiences in schizophrenia.


2002 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 913-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey M. Schaefer ◽  
Daren C. Jackson ◽  
Richard J. Davidson ◽  
Geoffrey K. Aguirre ◽  
Daniel Y. Kimberg ◽  
...  

Lesion and neuroimaging studies suggest the amygdala is important in the perception and production of negative emotion; however, the effects of emotion regulation on the amygdalar response to negative stimuli remain unknown. Using event-related fMRI, we tested the hypothesis that voluntary modulation of negative emotion is associated with changes in neural activity within the amygdala. Negative and neutral pictures were presented with instructions to either “maintain” the emotional response or “passively view” the picture without regulating the emotion. Each picture presentation was followed by a delay, after which subjects indicated how they currently felt via a response keypad. Consistent with previous reports, greater signal change was observed in the amygdala during the presentation of negative compared to neutral pictures. No significant effect of instruction was found during the picture presentation component of the trial. However, a prolonged increase in signal change was observed in the amygdala when subjects maintained the negative emotional response during the delay following negative picture offset. This increase in amygdalar signal due to the active maintenance of negative emotion was significantly correlated with subjects' self-reported dispositional levels of negative affect. These results suggest that consciously evoked cognitive mechanisms that alter the emotional response of the subject operate, at least in part, by altering the degree of neural activity within the amygdala.


Author(s):  
Matteo De Angelis ◽  
Cesare Amatulli ◽  
Valentina Bucciarelli

This chapter focuses on ethical consumption, analyzing the mechanisms behind the purchase preferences for fair trade apparel products through an investigation of the role of emotions. The results of an experimental study show that consumer preference for a fair-trade clothing item is driven by the recall of an unethical action and the emotional state aroused by it. The authors hypothesize that recalling an unethical action would trigger a negative emotional reaction in consumers, which, in turn, would increase their preference for a product carrying the fair-trade certification versus a product carrying a more traditional quality certification. Contrition has emerged as the negative emotion that mediates the effect of recalling an unethical action on product choice. The results shed light on a compensatory mechanism whereby consumers alleviate negative emotions arising from recalling an unethical behavior they had engaged in by making an ethical purchase.


2020 ◽  
pp. 088626051990094 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlo Garofalo ◽  
Craig S. Neumann ◽  
Patrizia Velotti

The importance of psychopathy in the forensic and criminal justice domains is largely due to its robust associations with aggression and violent behavior. Hence, investigators have increasingly been interested in elucidating potential mechanisms linking psychopathy and aggression. Recent research highlighted previously overlooked associations between psychopathy and difficulties in emotion regulation, the process responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and managing one’s emotional experience, as well as for guiding behavior under intense emotional arousal. Yet, it remains unclear whether emotion dysregulation may be helpful to explain well-documented associations between psychopathy and aggression. The present study examined whether emotion dysregulation mediated associations (i.e., explained a significant portion of the shared variance) between psychopathy and aggression across community ( N = 521) and offender ( N = 268) samples. Participants completed self-report measures of psychopathy, emotion dysregulation, trait aggressiveness (i.e., anger, hostility, physical and verbal aggression), as well as reactive and proactive aggression. Across both samples, psychopathy had significant indirect effect on all indices of aggression through emotion dysregulation, with the exception of verbal aggression. These findings support the relevance of emotion regulation for the construct of psychopathy and its maladaptive correlates and highlight the potential relevance of focusing on emotion regulation as a possible target for interventions aimed at reducing aggression among individuals with psychopathic traits.


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