Kersten Diers, Fanny Weber, Burkhard Brocke, Alexander Strobel, Sabine Schönfeld
Abstract
The choice of a meaningful baseline condition is a crucial issue for each experimental design. In the case of cognitive emotion regulation, it is common to either let participants passively view emotional stimuli without any further specific instructions or to instruct them to actively attend to and permit any arising emotions, and to contrast one of these baseline conditions with a regulation condition. While the "view" strategy can be assumed to allow for a more spontaneous emotional response, the "permit" strategy may result in a more pronounced affective and cognitive response. As these conceptual differences may be associated with differences both in subjective emotional experience and neural activation, we compared these two common control conditions within a single functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, during which participants were instructed to either passively view a set of unpleasant and neutral pictures or to actively permit any emotions arising in response to the unpleasant pictures. Trial-by-trial ratings confirmed that participants perceived the unpleasant pictures as more arousing than the neutral pictures, but also indicated higher subjective arousal during the "permit negative" as compared to the "view negative" and "view neutral" conditions. While both the "permit negative" and "view negative" conditions led to increased activation of the bilateral amygdala when contrasted with the passive viewing of neutral pictures, activation in the left amygdala was increased in response to the "permit" instruction as compared to the "view" instruction for unpleasant pictures. The increase in amygdala activation in both the "permit" and "view" conditions renders both strategies as suitable baseline conditions for studies of cognitive emotion regulation. Conceptual and activation differences, however, indicate that these two variants are not exchangeable and should be chosen depending on the experimental context.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 13 May 2014.
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#6,535,395
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#61,369
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#135
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Altmetric has tracked 23,577,654 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 72nd percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 31,442 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 69% of its peers.
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