Emotion Regulation Flashcards
What is the nemonic for this essay?
Peter Jackson Just Opened Our Eyes
What are the details of Philips et al’s (2003) model?
A stimuli is presented.
It is then appraised.
This appraisal leads to an affective state depending on the inherent hedonic characteristics of the stimuli.
This affective state is open to regulation, which also influences the original appraisal.
The point of regulation is to make sure emotions do not get too extreme.
Impaired in depression, leads to dominance of negative affect.
What did Joorman & Gotlib et al (2009) do?
Studied how the use of rumination, re-appraisal and expressive suppression affected the occurrence of depression and depressive symptoms in a depressed sample, formerly depressed sample and a control sample.
Total n = 101.
They found that depressed participants displayed a lack of inhibition when processing negative stimuli which was present in the other groups.
Reduced inhibition was associated with greater rumination in the depressed group.
Across entire sample, decreased use of inhibition of processing negative stimuli lead to less use of re-appraisal.
Within the formerly depressed group, less use of reappraisal and more rumination lead to more incidence of depressive symptoms.
What is rumination?
The internalisation of negative emotional stimuli (e.g letting negative life events influence your self-image and self-esteem) leading to the experiencing of depressive symptoms.
The relationship between risk factors and onset of depression has been shown to be modulated by ruminative patterns of though.
What did Joorman & D’Avanzato et al (2010) do?
Reviewed the literature on cognitive problems related to emotion regulation.
Concluded that the negatively biased memory, processing and attention in depressed individuals play a large role in maladaptive emotion regulation strategies which depressed people use.
What did Oschner & Gross (2005) do?
Showed that the PFC structures such as the DLPFC and VLPFC play a large role in the regulation of the emotional states generated by the amygdala.
What did Oschner et al (2002) do?
Used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of regulation strategies (reappraisal) in depressed individuals.
They investigated which brain areas were involved in the reappraisal of negative stimuli.
They found that increased medial and lateral PFC activation and decreased amygdala activation was associated with cognitive reappraisal techniques.
What did Erik et al (2010) do?
Investigated how cognitive strategies of emotion regulation are implemented by the brain. In particular the ability of the DLPFC to down regulate the activity of the amygdala through reappraisal and detachment techniques.
Participants consisted of depressed patients and controls.
They split the participants into a regulation condition who were told to view the stimuli as a detached observer and view the pictures as neutral and non-regulation group who were told to directly relay their emotions after seeing the stimuli.
The idea being that the worse a person is at down-regulating the emotional states of the amygdala, the more depressed they would be, correlation between ability to down-regulate and negativity.
During the task they took an fMRI of the participants.
They found that in depressed people there was little activity in the DLPFC compared to controls, making them less effective at down-regulating emotions.
Interaction of amygdala and DLPFC was strongly reduced.
They suggested from this finding that the failure of the PFC to down-regulate limbic structures leads to the dominance of negative affect and subsequent negative symptoms which are typical of depression.
