Cognitive processes supporting emotion regulation choices

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Emotion regulation - how we increase, decrease, or maintain our feelings - is essential to mental health and well-being. People choose from upwards of 20 strategies when regulating negative feelings, and these strategies vary in their effectiveness and long-term outcomes. For example, reappraisal (changing how you think about a situation to change your feelings) is effective for reducing negative feelings and leads to positive mental health outcomes. Distraction (focusing attention on something unrelated to the negative event to change how you feel) is effective in the short-term but can have negative consequences in the long-term if it is continued and leads to avoidance of situations. Therefore, it is critical to understand how and why people choose particular strategies in certain contexts. In laboratory studies, people prefer reappraisal to distraction to regulate their emotions in response to low intensity negative images, and vice versa for high intensity negative images. One leading theory explains this observation by suggesting that initially, we are automatically driven to disengage attention from negative events, and therefore distract. However, we can overcome this bias by exerting ourselves and considering the long-term consequences of our regulatory choices (i.e., to choose reappraisal instead of distraction). Presumably, when the intensity is too high, reappraisal is more difficult and less likely to be effective, and our automatic tendency to disengage from the negative event may overwhelm our ability to consider alternative ways of regulating. The goal of my research program is to uncover the mechanisms underlying how people choose between strategies. Methods include measuring individuals' pupil dilation and movements of the computer mouse when making choices between reappraisal and distraction. Pupil dilation is a quantitative measure that reflects cognitive effort: we predict that pupil dilation will be greater when individuals engage effortfully to make the more adaptive long-term emotion regulation choice (i.e., choosing reappraisal). Evidence of effortful choice should also be reflected in the computer mouse movements when individuals click a button on a computer screen to choose either reappraisal or distraction. We predict that the mouse trajectory will move more towards distraction when choosing reappraisal for high intensity emotional images, compared to when choosing reappraisal for low intensity emotional images. On the other hand, we may learn that making emotion regulation choices is not effortful, even when choosing reappraisal for high intensity emotional images. The results will go beyond previous research to help uncover how people make emotion regulation choices and inform theory on this topic. By elucidating how people choose among different strategies, we can determine which behaviours to target to develop tools to support effective emotion regulation in everyday life, and therefore improve well-being.