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1. A daily diary study of emotion regulation as a moderator of negative affect‐binge eating associations

   https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.23768  

   Mikhail, Megan E. ; Fowler, Natasha ; Burt, S. Alexandra ; Neale, Michael C. ; Keel, Pamela K. ; Katzman, Debra K. ; Klump, Kelly L. ( July 2022 , International Journal of Eating Disorders)

   While negative affect (NA) typically increases risk for binge eating, the ultimate impact of NA may depend on a person's ability to regulate their emotions. In this daily, longitudinal study, we examined whether emotion regulation (ER) modified the strength of NA‐dysregulated eating associations.

   Women (N = 311) from the Michigan State University Twin Registry first reported dimensional binge eating symptoms and broad ER difficulties (e.g., limited emotional awareness, difficulty controlling emotional impulses). Participants then rated use of adaptive (cognitive reappraisal, social sharing, situation modification, and acceptance) and maladaptive (rumination, expressive suppression, and self‐criticism) ER strategies, emotional eating (EE), objective binge eating (OBE), and NA once daily for 49 consecutive days.

   There were several main effects of ER on binge‐eating pathology in both between‐person (i.e., comparing women who differed on average) and within‐person (i.e., examining fluctuations in variables day‐to‐day) analyses. Between‐person, greater broad ER difficulties, greater maladaptive strategy use, and lower adaptive strategy use were all associated with greater binge‐eating pathology. Within‐person, greater maladaptive strategy use was associated with greater odds of OBE on that day and on the following day. However, neither broad ER difficulties nor use of specific strategies moderated associations between NA and dysregulated eating in between‐ or within‐person analyses.

   While ER is independently associated with risk for dysregulated eating, it may not fully mitigate the impact of NA. Additional strategies (e.g., decreasing environmental stressors and increasing social support) may be needed to minimize NA and its impact on dysregulated eating.

   Negative affect (NA; e.g., sadness, guilt) increases dysregulated eating risk. Because NA is sometimes unavoidable, we examined whether emotion regulation (ER; i.e., how a person responds to their emotions) might impact whether NA leads to dysregulated eating. Although more effective ER was associated with less dysregulated eating overall, ER did not impact the association between NA and dysregulated eating. Other approaches may therefore be needed to mitigate NA‐dysregulated eating associations.

    

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2. A Computational View of the Emotional Regulation of Disgust using Multimodal Sensors

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FG47880.2020.00145  

   Kota, Vidhathri ; Gali, Geeta Madhav ; Nwogu, Ifeoma ( November 2020 , 15th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2020))

   null (Ed.)

   Emotion regulation can be characterized by different activities that attempt to alter an emotional response, whether behavioral, physiological or neurological. The two most widely adopted strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression are explored in this study, specifically in the context of disgust. Study participants (N = 21) experienced disgust via video exposure, and were instructed to either regulate their emotions or express them freely. If regulating, they were required to either cognitively reappraise or suppress their emotional experiences while viewing the videos. Video recordings of the participants' faces were taken during the experiment and electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyography (EMG), and galvanic skin response (GSR) readings were also collected for further analysis. We compared the participants behavioral (facial musculature movements) and physiological (GSR and heart rate) responses as they aimed to alter their emotional responses and computationally determined that when responding to disgust stimuli, the signals recorded during suppression and free expression were very similar, whereas those recorded during cognitive reappraisal were significantly different. Thus, in the context of this study, from a signal analysis perspective, we conclude that emotion regulation via cognitive reappraisal significantly alters participants' physiological responses to disgust, unlike regulation via suppression. 

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3. Sinful pleasures and pious woes? Using fMRI to examine evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge

   https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsac024  

   Lee, Kent M. ; Lee, SuhJin ; Satpute, Ajay B. ( March 2022 , Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience)

   Traditionally, lust and pride have been considered pleasurable, yet sinful in the West. Conversely, guilt is often considered aversive, yet valuable. These emotions illustrate how evaluations about specific emotions and beliefs about their hedonic properties may often diverge. Evaluations about specific emotions may shape important aspects of emotional life (e.g. in emotion regulation, emotion experience and acquisition of emotion concepts). Yet these evaluations are often understudied in affective neuroscience. Prior work in emotion regulation, affective experience, evaluation/attitudes and decision-making point to anterior prefrontal areas as candidates for supporting evaluative emotion knowledge. Thus, we examined the brain areas associated with evaluative and hedonic emotion knowledge, with a focus on the anterior prefrontal cortex. Participants (N = 25) made evaluative and hedonic ratings about emotion knowledge during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) and precuneus was associated with an evaluative (vs hedonic) focus on emotion knowledge. Our results suggest that the mPFC and vmPFC, in particular, may play a role in evaluating discrete emotions.

    

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4. The role of trait reappraisal in response to emotional ambiguity: A meta-analysis.

   Harp, Nicholas R. ; Gross, James J. ; Uusberg, Andero ; Neta, Maital ( November 2023 , Emotion)

   Individuals exhibit a systematic valence bias—a specific form of interpretation bias—in response to emo- tional ambiguity. Accumulating evidence suggests most people initially respond to emotional ambiguity negatively and differ only in subsequent responses. We hypothesized that trait-level cognitive reap- praisal—an emotion regulation strategy involving the reinterpretation of affective meaning of stimuli— might explain individual differences in valence bias. To answer this question, we conducted a random- effects meta-analysis of 14 effect sizes from 13 prior studies (n = 2,086), identified via Google Scholar searches. We excluded studies (a) in languages other than English, (b) from non-peer-reviewed sources, or (c) nonempirical sources. We included studies with (a) the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, (b) a puta- tive measure of valence bias prior to any study-specific manipulations, and (c) adult human participants (i.e., 17+). Supporting our prediction, we found individuals with higher trait reappraisal exhibited a less negative bias (r = −.18, z = −4.04, p , .001), whereas there was a smaller, opposite effect for trait expressive sup- pression (r = .10, z = 2.14, p = .03). The effects did, however, vary across tasks with stronger effects observed among studies using the scrambled sentences task compared to the valence bias task. Although trait reappraisal accounted for only a small amount of variance, reappraisal may be one mechanism contrib- uting to variability in response to ambiguity. 

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5. Mothers' interoceptive knowledge predicts children's emotion regulation and social skills in middle childhood

   https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12418  

   MacCormack, Jennifer K. ; Castro, Vanessa L. ; Halberstadt, Amy G. ; Rogers, Megan L. ( November 2019 , Social Development)

   Interoception, often defined as the perception of internal physiological changes, is implicated in many adult social affective processes, but its effects remain understudied in the context of parental socialization of children's emotions. We hypothesized that what parents know about the interoceptive concomitants of emotions, orinteroceptive knowledge(e.g., “my heart races when excited”), may be especially relevant in emotion socialization and in supporting children's working models of emotions and the social world. We developed a measure of mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions and examined its relation to children's social affective outcomes relative to other socialization factors, including self‐reported parental behaviors, emotion beliefs, and knowledge of emotion‐relevant situations and non‐verbal expressions. To assess these, mothers (N = 201) completed structured interviews and questionnaires. A few months later, third‐grade teachers rated children's social skills and emotion regulation observed in the classroom. Results indicated that mothers' interoceptive knowledge about their own emotions was associated with children's social affective skills (emotion regulation, social initiative, cooperation, self‐control), even after controlling for child gender and ethnicity, family income, maternal stress, and the above maternal socialization factors. Overall, findings suggest that mothers' interoceptive knowledge may provide an additional, unique pathway by which children acquire social affective competence.

    

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