تنظیم احساسات و وحشت قوی در سراسر تصویر عاطفی و تهدید از شوک پارادایم

Abstract Past studies beginning with Jackson et al. [Jackson, D.C., Malmstadt, J.R., Larson, C.L., Davidson, R.J., 2000. Suppression and enhancement of emotional responses to unpleasant pictures. Psychophysiology 37 (4), 515–522.] document increases and decreases in emotionally-potentiated startle by way of instructing participants to enhance or suppress their emotional responses to symbolic sources of threat (unpleasant pictures). The present study extends this line of work to a threat-of-shock paradigm to assess whether startle potentiation elicited by threat of actual danger or pain is subject to emotion regulation. Results point to successful volitional modulation for both Affective-Picture and Threat-of-Shock experiments with startle magnitudes from largest to smallest occurring in the enhance, maintain, and suppress conditions. Successful regulation of startle potentiation to the threat of shock found by the current study supports the external validity of the Jackson paradigm for assessment of regulation processes akin to those occurring in the day-to-day context in response to real elicitors of emotion.

. Conclusion The current study sought to assess the degree to which willful regulation of emotionally-potentiated startle to hypothetical threat, found by Jackson et al. (2000), extends to regulation of startle potentiation to actual threat. Results demonstrate that volitional attempts to suppress and enhance negative emotion led to decreased and increased startle potentiation to both unpleasant pictures (hypothetical threat) and threat of shock (actual threat), verifying the external validity of the Jackson method for examining regulation processes analogous to those occurring in the day-to-day context in response to real sources of danger or pain. Though initial analyses indicated greater enhancing and less full suppression of negative emotion elicited by threat of shock versus unpleasant pictures, such results became nonsignificant after covarying out paradigm differences in magnitudes of unregulated startle potentiation. Thus enhancing and suppressing differences across paradigms were a function of the stronger unregulated potentiation to threat of shock rather than to regulatory processes per se.