The effects of implicit emotion regulation on impulsive choice

Impulsive choice is closely associated with heightened engagement in risk-related behaviours, and emotion regulation may play a critical role in how immediate emotions influence choice outcomes, with different strategies producing distinct effects. Grounded in the Affective Information Theory and the Appraisal-Tendency Framework, we investigated the effects of two widely adopted implicit emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, on impulsive choice across specific emotional states through two experiments. Results revealed that individuals exhibited a stronger preference for larger-later (LL) rewards under happiness compared to anger, while no significant difference emerged in preference for delayed options between anger and fear conditions. Both implicit cognitive reappraisal and implicit expressive suppression strategies effectively reduced the selection proportion of smaller-sooner (SS) rewards with comparable efficacy. Furthermore, both strategies demonstrated significant regulatory effects on anger, happiness and fear, with implicit expressive suppression potentially exhibiting superior applicability for fear modulation. These findings enrich theories of emotion regulation and refine the theoretical framework linking emotional states to choice behaviour, offering novel directions for interventions aimed at reducing impulsive choice.