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Updated: Jun 2, 2026

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation
Published on: August 26, 2011
Effects of instructed emotion regulation on valence, arousal, and attentional measures of affective processing
Edward M Bernat1, Meredith Cadwallader, Dongju Seo
1Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4301, USA. ebernat@fsu.edu
Abstract:
Cognitive control of emotion has been investigated using tasks prompting participants to increase or decrease emotional responding to affective pictures. This study provides a more comprehensive evaluation of responding in this task by including: pleasant and unpleasant pictures, increase and decrease instructions, additional physiological measures, and a fully randomized design. Findings suggest that control efforts did modulate higher-level affective responses indexed by self-reported valence and expressive facial muscles, but not lower-level affective responses indexed by startle blink and heart rate. Similarly, electrocortical measures evidenced expectable affective responses and control-related activity, but no modulation of affective patterns due to the control efforts.
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