Temporal course of implicit emotion regulation during a Priming-Identify task: an ERP study

Abstract

Implicit emotion regulation defined as goal-driven processes modulates emotion experiences and responses automatically without awareness. However, the temporal course of implicit emotion regulation is not clear. To address these issues, we adopted a new Priming-identify task (PI task) to manipulate implicit emotion regulation directly and observed the changes of early (N170), middle (early posterior negativity, EPN), and late event-related potentials (ERPs) components (late positivity potentials, LPP) under the different implicit emotion regulation conditions. The behavioral results indicated that the PI task manipulated subjective emotion experience effectively by priming emotion regulation goals. The ERP results found that implicit emotion regulation induced more negative N170 without altering the EPN and the LPP amplitudes, indicating that implicit emotion regulation occured automatically in the early perceptual stage not in the late selective attention stage of emotion processing. The correlation analysis also found the enlarged N170 was associated with decreased negative emotion subjective rating, suggesting that the N170 was probably an effective index of implicit emotion regulation. These observations imply that implicit emotion regulation probabbly occurs in the early stage of emotion processing automatically without consciousness.

Figure 1. The subjective ratings of negative emotion experience in three priming conditions and two ordinal positions.

The larger rating scores indicated stronger negative emotion experience. The ANOVAs results revealed a main effect of priming conditions. Both priming control and expression showed lower negative emotion experience ratings than priming unrelated condition, regardless of the ordinal positions. The difference between priming control and expression was not significant. Error bars indicate the standard error (* means p < 0.050).

Figure 2. Grand averages of N170 and EPN amplitudes evoked during the PI task at P8 and PO8.

Priming emotion regulation goals enhanced N170 amplitude compared to priming unrelated words, whereas EPN amplitude was not modulated by implicit emotion regulation.

Figure 3. Grand averages of LPP elicited by threatening faces during the PI task at CPZ.

The LPP amplitude did not vary with priming conditions.

Figure 4. Two-tailed correlations between N170 amplitude and emotion ratings of negative emotion experience.

(a) priming control condition (b) priming expression condition (c) priming unrelated condition.

Figure 5. The sequence of the Priming-Identify task in one single block.

Participants were required to complete 10 trials of word matching task, followed by 66 trials of emotion distinction task, with negative emotion experience ratings twice. The facial materials in the emotion distinction task were chosen from the Chinese Facial Affective Picture System (CFAPS).