Leader humility and employee voice behavior: The mediating effects of work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies

BACKGROUND: Employee’s expression of voice needs cognitive and emotional resources to express the constructive challenge. Leader humility, with the characteristics of openness to new ideas and feedback, may provide employees with psychological resources to express their voice. This study considers work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies as psychological resources and examines their mediating effects. OBJECTIVE: Referring to the conservation of resources theory and affective events theory, this study aims to examine the mediating effects of work engagement and cognitive emotion regulation strategies on the relationships between leader humility and employees voice behaviors. METHODS: This study conducted a questionnaire survey on managers and employees at travel enterprises in China. Based on a survey of 837 valid questionnaires, participants provided their perception for the proposed research model. RESULTS: The results show that enhancing work engagement and controlled emotion regulation strategies and reducing automatic emotion regulation strategies partially mediate the relationships between leader humility and employee’s prohibitive voice. CONCLUSIONS: Enhancing work engagement and reducing automatic emotion regulation strategies have the mediating effects. However, controlled emotion regulation strategies and promotive voice need much psychological resources, employee adopting controlled emotion regulation doesn’t affect promotive voice and have mediating effects significantly.

Child abuse and automatic emotion regulation in children and adolescents

Child abuse is associated with elevated risk for psychopathology. The current study examined the role of automatic emotion regulation as a potential mechanism linking child abuse with internalizing psychopathology. A sample of 237 youth aged 8–16 years and their caregivers participated. Child abuse severity was assessed by self-report questionnaires, and automatic emotion regulation was assessed using an emotional Stroop task designed to measure adaptation to emotional conflict. A similar task without emotional stimuli was also administered to evaluate whether abuse was uniquely associated with emotion regulation, but not cognitive control applied in a nonemotional context. Internalizing psychopathology was assessed concurrently and at a 2-year longitudinal follow-up. Child abuse severity was associated with lower emotional conflict adaptation but was unrelated to cognitive control. Specifically, the severity of emotional and physical abuse, but not sexual abuse, were associated with lower emotional conflict adaptation. Emotional conflict adaptation was not associated with internalizing psychopathology prospectively. These findings suggest that childhood emotional and physical abuse, in particular, may influence automatic forms of emotion regulation. Future work exploring the socioemotional consequences of altered automatic emotion regulation among youth exposed to child abuse is clearly needed.

Child Abuse Subtypes and Automatic Emotion Regulation Processes in Children and Adolescents

Child abuse is associated with elevated risk for psychopathology. The current study examined the role of automatic emotion regulation as a potential mechanism linking child abuse with internalizing psychopathology. A sample of 237 youth aged 8–16 years and their caregivers participated. Child abuse severity was assessed by self-report questionnaires, and automatic emotion regulation was assessed using an emotional Stroop task designed to measure adaptation to emotional conflict. A similar task without emotional stimuli was also administered to evaluate whether abuse was uniquely associated with emotion regulation, but not cognitive control applied in a non-emotional context. Internalizing psychopathology was assessed concurrently and at a two-year longitudinal follow-up. Child abuse severity was associated with lower emotional conflict adaptation but was unrelated to cognitive control. Specifically, the severity of emotional and physical abuse, but not sexual abuse, were associated with lower emotional conflict adaptation. Emotional conflict adaptation was not associated with internalizing psychopathology prospectively. These findings suggest that childhood emotional and physical abuse, in particular, may influence automatic forms of emotion regulation. Future work exploring the socioemotional consequences of altered automatic emotion regulation among youth exposed to child abuse is clearly needed.

Functional Decoupling of Emotion Coping Network Subsides Automatic Emotion Regulation by Implementation Intention

Automatic emotion regulation (AER) plays a vital role in the neuropathology underlying both suicide and self-harm via modifying emotional impact effortlessly. However, both the effortless account and the neural mechanisms of AER are undetermined. To investigate the neural changes at AER, we collected functional MRI (fMRI) in 31 participants who attended to neutral and disgust pictures in three conditions: watching, goal intention (GI), and reappraisal by implementation intention (RII). Results showed that RII (but not GI) decreased negative feelings and bilateral amygdala activity without increasing cognitive efforts, evidenced by the reduced effort rating and less prefrontal engagement during RII compared with during watching and GI. These emotion-regulatory effects of RII cannot be explained by emotional habituation, as the supplementary experiment ( N = 31 ) showed no emotional habituation effects when the same disgust pictures were presented repeatedly three times for each watching and GI condition. Task-based network analysis showed both RII and GI relative to watching increased functional connectivities (FCs) of the ventral anterior cingulate cortex to the left insula and right precuneus during conditions, two FCs subserving goal setup. However, RII relative to GI exhibited weaker FCs in brain networks subserving effortful control, memory retrieval, aversive anticipation, and motor planning. In these FCs, the FC intensity of putamen-operculum/lingual and paracentral-superior temporal gyri positively predicted regulatory difficulty ratings. These findings suggest that the setup of implementation intention automatizes emotion regulation by reducing the online mobilization of emotion-coping neural systems.

Functional decoupling of emotion coping network subserves automatic emotion regulation by implementation intention

Automatic emotion regulation (AER) aims at modifying emotional impact effortlessly. However, the effortless account and the neural mechanisms of AER are both undetermined. For this purpose, we collected functional neuroimages (fMRI) in thirty-one participants who attended to neutral and disgust pictures in three conditions: Watching, Goal Intention (GI) and Reappraisal by Implementation Intention (RII). RII decreased negative feelings and bilateral amygdala activity without eliciting cognitive efforts, evidenced by the reduced effort rating and less prefrontal engagement during RII compared to Watching and GI. These regulation effects should not be explained by emotional habituation, as Experiment 2 (n=40) observed no habituation to stimulus repetitions. Task-based network analysis showed similar functional connectivity (FC) of ventral anterior cingulate cortex to left insula and right precuneus during RII and GI conditions, both involving goal setup. Furthermore, RII relative to GI exhibited weaker FC in brain networks subserving effortful control (e.g. inferior-superior parietal FC), memory retrieval (e.g. inferior-middle temporal and lingual-putamen FCs), aversive anticipation and motor planning (e.g. Paracentral-superior temporal gyrus, putamen-operculum FCs). The FC strength of putamen to operculum/lingual, and paracentral to STG positively predicts regulatory difficulty. These results suggest that the setup of implementation intention automatizes emotion regulation, by reducing online mobilization of neural systems underlying the stream of emotion coping.