Abstract
Cognitive strategies such as reappraisal reduce the intensity of negative experience and brain activity that is sensitive to emotional salience. The time course of reappraisal-related neural modulation remains unclear, and it is unknown whether the electrocortical response to emotional stimuli is sensitive to reappraisal. Event-related brain potentials were recorded first while participants passively viewed pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures, and then during an emotion regulation block in which participants were instructed to attend to or reappraise unpleasant pictures. The late positive potential (LPP) was enhanced for pleasant and unpleasant pictures in the passive viewing block, and reappraisal resulted in a reliably reduced LPP—a protracted modulation that began 200 msec after stimulus onset. The degree of LPP modulation was positively related to reductions in the self-reported emotional intensity that followed emotion regulation instructions. These results indicate that reappraisal modulates early electrocortical activity that is related to emotional salience, and that the LPP is a useful tool for studying emotion regulation.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-IV. Washington, DC: Author.
Anderson, A. K., & Phelps, E. A. (2001). Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events. Nature, 411, 305–309.
Beauregard, M., Lévesque, J., & Bourgouin, P. (2001). Neural correlates of conscious self-regulation of emotion. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 6993–7000.
Cuthbert, B. N., Schupp, H. T., Bradley, M. M., Birbaumer, N., & Lang, P. J. (2000). Brain potentials in affective picture processing: Covariation with autonomic arousal and affective report. Biological Psychology, 52, 95–111.
Delorme, A., & Makeig, S. (2004). EEGLAB: An open source toolbox for analysis of single-trial EEG dynamics including independent component analysis. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 134, 9–21.
Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2, 271–299.
Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39, 281–291.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and wellbeing. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 85, 348–362.
Hajcak, G., Moser, J. S., & Simons, R. F. (2006). Attending to affect: Appraisal strategies modulate the electrocortical response to arousing pictures. Emotion, 6, 517–522.
Hariri, A. R., Mattay, V. S., Tessitore, A., Fera, F., & Weinberger, D. R. (2003). Neocortical modulation of the amygdala response to fearful stimuli. Biological Psychiatry, 53, 494–501.
John, O. P., & Gross, J. J. (2004). Healthy and unhealthy emotion regulation: Personality processes, individual differences, and life span development. Journal of Personality, 72, 1301–1333.
Keightley, M. L., Winocur, G., Graham, S. J., Mayberg, H. S., Hevenor, S. J., & Grady, C. L. (2003). An fMRI study investigating cognitive modulation of brain regions associated with emotional processing of visual stimuli. Neuropsychologia, 41, 585–596.
Keil, A., Bradley, M. M., Hauk, O., Rockstroh, B., Elbert, T., & Lang, P. J. (2002). Large-scale neural correlates of affective pictureprocessing. Psychophysiology, 39, 641–649.
Lang, P. J., Bradley, M. M., & Cuthbert, B. N. (1997). Motivated attention: Affect, activation, and action. In P. J. Lang, R. F. Simons, & M. T. Balaban (Eds.), Attention and orienting: Sensory and motivational processes (pp. 97–135). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lang, P. J., Bradley, M. M., & Cuthbert, B. N. (1999). International Affective Picture System: Instruction manual and affective ratings (Tech. Rep. No. A-4). University of Florida, Center for Research in Psychophysiology.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Progress on a cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion. American Psychologist, 46, 819–834.
Lévesque, J., Eugene, F., Joanette, Y., Paquette, V., Mensour, B., Beaudoin, G., et al. (2003). Neural circuitry underlying voluntary suppression of sadness. Biological Psychiatry, 53, 502–510.
Moser, J. S., Hajcak, G., Bukay, E., & Simons, R. F. (2006). Intentional modulation of emotional responding to unpleasant pictures: An ERP study. Psychophysiology, 43, 292–296.
Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings: An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 1215–1229.
Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2004). Thinking makes it so: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to emotion regulation. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications (pp. 229–255). New York: Guilford.
Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. D., Cooper, J. C., Robertson, E. R., Chopra, S., Gabrieli, J. D. E., & Gross, J. J. (2004). For better or for worse: Neural systems supporting the cognitive down- and up-regulation of negative emotion. NeuroImage, 23, 483–499.
Phan, K. L., Fitzgerald, D. A., Nathan, P. J., Moore, G. J., Uhde, T. W., & Tancer, M. E. (2005). Neural substrates for voluntary suppression of negative affect: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Biological Psychiatry, 57, 210–219.
Ray, R. D., Ochsner, K. N., Cooper, J. C., Robertson, E. R., Gabrieli, J. D. E., & Gross, J. J. (2005). Individual differences in trait rumination and the neural systems supporting cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 5, 156–168.
Schupp, H. T., Cuthbert, B. N., Bradley, M. M., Cacioppo, J. T., Ito, T., & Lang, P. J. (2000). Affective picture processing: The late positive potential is modulated by motivational relevance. Psychophysiology, 37, 257–261.
Schupp, H. T., Junghöfer, M., Weike, A. I., & Hamm, A. O. (2003). Emotional facilitation of sensory processing in the visual cortex. Psychological Science, 14, 7–13.
Thompson, R. A. (1994). Emotion regulation: A theme in search of definition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59, 25–52, 250-283.
Whalen, P. J., Rauch, S. L., Etcoff, N. L., McInerney, S. C., Lee, M. B., & Jenike, M. A. (1998). Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 411–418.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported in part by NIMH predoctoral fellowship Grant MH069047 to G.H. and by a grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to S.N.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hajcak, G., Nieuwenhuis, S. Reappraisal modulates the electrocortical response to unpleasant pictures. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 6, 291–297 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.6.4.291
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.6.4.291