Suppression and enhancement of emotional responses to unpleasant pictures

Despite the prominence of emotional dysfunction in psychopathology, relativ ely few experiments have explicitly studied emotion regulation in adults. T he present study examined one type of emotion regulation: voluntary regulat ion of short-term emotional responses to unpleasant visual stimuli. In a sa mple of 48 college students, both eyeblink startle magnitude and corrugator activity were sensitive to experimental manipulation. Instructions to supp ress negative emotion led to both smaller startle eyeblinks and decreased c orrugator activity. Instructions to enhance negative emotion led to larger startle eyeblinks and increased corrugator activity. Several advantages of this experimental manipulation ale discussed, including the use of both a s uppress and an enhance emotion condition, independent measurement of initia l emotion elicitation and subsequent regulation of that emotion, the use of a completely within-subjects design, and the use of naturalistic emotion r egulation strategies.