Neurophysiological and Behavior Responses in Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is the ability to modify the intensity and time course of emotional experiences and expressions to manage arousal, such as negative and positive responses. Emotion regulation is crucial for the development of adaptive social functioning. Few studies have a measurement method for identifying neural markers to examine the correlation between neural and behavior response of emotion regulation. We assessed whether neural and behavior responses to attention-emotion integration task were related to emotion regulation capacities. Before and after the negative and positive video clips were shown, EEG was recorded while participants performed attention-emotion integration task. P100, P300 amplitude, and latency were closely correlated with each other. Specially, after the negative video clip was shown, the larger the P100 amplitudes at the specific positions, the longer the P300 latencies at these same positions during attention-emotion integration task. The longer the P300 latencies at the specific positions, the longer the delay in response time. Also, there is and individual differences in ERP components and response time during attention-emotion integration task. Individuals who had larger and longer amplitude and latency of ERP components showed longer response times during attention-emotion integration task, regardless of whether video clips were presented or not. This characteristic was related to the enhanced emotion regulation.