传统的中国哲学和医学思想从五行相生相克的角度提出了“悲克怒”、“怒克思”等以情胜情的情绪调节方法，尽管长期以来这种思想在传统的医学实践和身心调养中发挥着一般性的指导作用，但却鲜有研究从实证的角度对此进行科学验证。本项目在前期探索工作中采用实验心理学方法验证了“悲克怒”、“恐生怒”、“怒克思”等假设的有效性，并发现了以情胜情的调节方法相比于常用的情绪的认知调节策略所具有的优势，即它不像认知调节策略那样依赖于前额叶的执行控制功能因而很容易因为前额叶功能受到应激因素的影响而失效。为了系统研究相生相克调节策略发挥作用的心理与脑科学原理，我们将在研究不同类型的情绪的认知神经科学表征方式的异同的基础上，研究和揭示不同情绪间的相互作用模式及其心理效应与脑认知过程，检验与“悲克怒”和“怒克思”等具体调节策略相关的特定研究假设，为建立比较系统的情绪（情志）相生相克调节理论奠定基础。

Traditional Chinese philosophical and medical theory have suggested the emotion regulation (ER) approach of “regulate one emotion by another” (such as “sadness counteracts anger” and “anger counteracts rumination”), from the principle of mutual promotion and mutual counteraction (MPMC) of yin-yang and five elements. Although this approach has been widely recognized as a general guideline for the practice of traditional Chinese medicine, as well as for the way of taking care of one’s body and mind health, there is still no experimental study to testify it. In this project, we have proved several hypotheses of this ER strategy (including “sadness counteracts anger”, “fear promote anger”, and “anger counteracts rumination”) through psychological experiments in our preliminary exploration on this issue, and found the advantage of this strategy. That is, it provides an alternative strategy that may overcome the defect of the cognitive regulation strategy that relies heavily on the top-down control function of prefrontal cortex (PFC), which was found could be critically impaired in stressful situations. In this project, we plan to identify the similarities/dissimilarities among different types of emotions (such as sadness, fear, and anger) in their way of cognitive and neural representation, and further investigate the psychological effects and neural information processing processes accompanying the interactions between different emotions. We also plan to examine different hypotheses on these specific MPMC-based ER strategies such as “sadness counteracts anger” and “anger counteracts rumination”, to provide a deep and comprehensive understanding on the mechanism of this ER strategy.