The lateral prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices have both been implicated in emotion regulation, but their distinct roles in regulation of negative emotion remain poorly understood. To address this issue we enrolled 58 participants in an fMRI study in which participants were instructed to reappraise both negative and neutral stimuli. This design allowed us to separately study activations refl...

Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) show evidence of disturbed emotion regulation. In particular, patients may try to suppress their emotions with possibly negative effects on mental health. We investigated the suppression of both negative and positive emotions in BPD patients and healthy participants. Thirty BPD patients and 30 matched healthy controls were assessed for emotion...

The study examined the effect of negative emotion on consolidation of both item and source memory. Participants learned words read by either a male or female. Then they watched either a negative or a neutral video clip. Memory tests were carried out either 25min or 24h after learning. The study yielded the following findings. First, negative emotion enhanced consolidation of item memory as meas...

Emotion regulation is generally thought to be a critical ingredient for successful interpersonal relationships. Ironically, few studies have investigated the link between how well spouses regulate emotion and how satisfied they are with their marriages. We utilized data from a 13-year, 3-wave longitudinal study of middle-aged (40-50 years old) and older (60-70 years old) long-term married coupl...

Background: Psychological pressures following divorce disturb women’s psychosocial adaptation. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) on psychosocial adjustment and cognitive emotion regulation in divorced women. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted using a quasi-experimental method with a pretest-posttest design and a control group. ...

Objectives: While fears of negative or aversive emotions are linked to experiential avoidance and psychopathology, recent studies have also focused on the relation between psychopathology and fear of positive emotions. This study explores 1. which negative emotions of anger, anxiety and sadness on most feared and avoided and 2. the links between fears and avoidance of negative emotions, with fe...

The emotion regulation literature is growing exponentially, but there is limited understanding of the comparative strengths of emotion regulation strategies in downregulating positive emotional experiences. The present research made the first systematic investigation examining the consequences of using expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal strategies to downregulate positive and nega...