The Impairment Effects on Conditioned Fear Response: Induced by Instructed and Habitual Emotion Regulation

AN Xian-Li; CHEN Si-Guang; SONG Yi; YANG Beng

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2017, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (1) : 2-8.

The Impairment Effects on Conditioned Fear Response: Induced by Instructed and Habitual Emotion Regulation

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Abstract

Stressful events are frequent antecedents. Emotion regulation (ER) was usually used to control emotional responses in stressful circumstances. The present study explored the effects of habitual ER (HER) and instructed ER (IER) manipulation on fear conditioning. It has been proved that IER is effective in decreasing subjective emotional ratings, skin conductance responses (SCR) and amygdala activation to negative emotional stimuli. But the relationships between different HER strategies and emotional responses are dissimilar. Previous researches have demonstrated that habitual reappraisal was positively related with positive emotions and negatively related with negative emotions, but the relationships of habitual suppression with positive and negative emotions are reversed. Nevertheless, suppression is not necessarily harmful in regulating emotions. People always automatically choose HER strategies in an emotion-specific manner. It was proved that suppression was the first choice and was more effective in inhibiting unconditioned fear response. However, for conditioned fear, although a few experiments found the inhibition effects of IER, there are very few studies concerning the effects of HER and it’s interaction with IER. A sample of 81 college students were involved. On day1, the participants first completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) to test their habitual reappraisal and suppression levels and then underwent training using a partial reinforcement fear conditioning paradigm. Before the fear conditioning, all participants were randomly divided into two groups: instructed regulation and attend group. The instructed regulation participants were taught to regulate their fear responses to the aversive stimulus. Fear conditioning followed IER training 5 min later, in which the participants learned that one colored square (e.g., blue, conditioned stimulus [CS+]) predicted a loud white noise (unconditioned stimulus [US]) and another colored square (e.g., yellow, [CS–]) was presented alone. In the fear conditioning train, the participants in the instructed regulation group had to use the newly acquired regulation skills and the participants in the attend group were asked to view the stimulus and attend to their natural feelings when the CS was presented. On day2, fear expression was tested by presenting the CS without the US. SCRs were acquired in experiment. According to the medians of the reappraisal (R) and suppression (S) scores in questionnaire test, participants were asigned into low R- low S (LR-LS), high R- low S (HR or LS), low R- high S (LR-HS) and high R- high S (HR-HS) groups. The results showed that IER can successfully inhibit the levels of conditioned fear both in fear conditioning train and test stages. For HER, the levels of habitual suppression but not reappraisal are significantly negative related with conditioned fear. Moreover, compared with LS groups, HS participants present significant lower SCR levels in both fear condtioning stages. The SCR levels of LR and HR groups are comparable. These results suggest that both IER and HER could effectively inhibit conditioned fear. It can be speculated that the influences of stress events may be limited for most sufferers. Both IER and HER can weaken fear response and protect individuals from mental injuries in stressful situations.

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instructed emotion regulation / habitual emotion regulation / reappraisal / suppression / fear conditioning

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The Impairment Effects on Conditioned Fear Response: Induced by Instructed and Habitual Emotion Regulation[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2017, 40(1): 2-8

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