Estimation Strategy Utilization Is Modulated by Implicit Emotion Regulation: Evidence from Behavioral and...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Emotional Regulation

Background:

• Previous research focused on explicit emotion regulation's impact on cognitive tasks.
• The influence of implicit emotion regulation on estimation performance remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effects of implicit emotion regulation (reappraisal and suppression) on computational estimation performance.
• To explore the neural mechanisms underlying implicit emotion regulation during estimation tasks using event-related potentials (ERPs).

Main Methods:

• Participants engaged in an idiom matching task for implicit emotion regulation, followed by a multiplication computational estimation task (MCE).
• Behavioral data (estimation speed and accuracy) and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the MCE task.
• Implicit reappraisal and suppression were induced via a word-matching task preceding the estimation task.

Main Results:

• Both implicit reappraisal and suppression improved estimation speed but not accuracy.
• ERPs indicated distinct neural effects during encoding and retrieval phases.
• Implicit reappraisal modulated early encoding sensitivity (P1, N170) and later attention resource allocation (LPC2, LPC3), while implicit suppression primarily affected early encoding sensitivity (P1).

Conclusions:

• Implicit emotion regulation strategies, both reappraisal and suppression, enhance cognitive estimation speed.
• Implicit suppression demonstrates a more advantageous regulatory effect compared to implicit reappraisal, particularly in terms of attentional resource utilization during cognitive tasks.