The impact of emotion regulation strategies on experiential and physiological responses to negative emotional videos

Emotion regulation strategies influence how individuals experience and express emotions. Previous work suggests that self-distancing can reduce negative emotional responses, whereas self-immersion can amplify them. This study quantified how these emotion regulation strategies, applied during exposure to negative and neutral videos, shaped self-rated emotional experience across valence, arousal and intensity dimensions, influenced the free production of emotion-descriptive labels and altered measures of respiratory and cardiovascular physiology. A total of 45 participants took part in a task during which they were prompted to simply watch, or to self-distance from or self-immerse in, the emotional content of negative or neutral videos, which were presented in 12, 30-s blocks. Their rated emotional experience (valence-arousal-intensity ratings and free emotion labels) was recorded, along with cardiovascular and respiratory activity. Overall, self-distancing and self-immersing respectively attenuated and amplified aspects of subjective emotion experience relative to comparator conditions as predicted. Self-distancing reduced freely generated emotion labels corresponding to fear, but had less impact on labels corresponding to disgust, sadness and anger. The effects of emotional regulation strategies on cardiorespiratory physiology (e.g. heart rate) potentially also differ between individuals. Together, this work validates a framework for dissecting components of induced emotion, highlighting commonalities and variability in experiential and physiological reactivity and effects of regulation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Mechanisms, development, phylogeny and functions of emotional expressions'.