Regulation of Sadness: Physiological Dynamics

The more knowledge is obtained about emotion regulation, the more salient becomes the significance of research in this area. Among other emotions, sadness is the one closely related to contemporary pertinent problems of anxiety and depression disorders. On the other hand, the problem of short-term and long-term effects when evaluating efficiency of emotion regulation has been overlooked. We thus designed and conducted a within-subject experiment to investigate the dynamics of components of emotional response for regulated (either using suppression or distraction) and unregulated conditions over 3 minutes time course. We expected distraction to be more efficient in reducing self-reported affect and suppression to be more efficient in reducing emotional expressivity. Autonomic arousal parameters were supposed to be higher for regulated trials. Results justified the suggestion about distraction being more efficient in reducing negative affect. Surprisingly, suppression did not lead to lower expressivity and autonomic arousal did not prove higher for regulated trials. Possible interpretations of these results are discussed and limitations of the study outlined.