The Effects of Distraction and Reappraisal on the Late Positive Potential Across Discrete Emotions: A Study With...

This study examined the effects of two emotion regulation (ER) strategies: reappraisal and distraction on the late positive potential (LPP) in a sample of Latinx children (n = 78, ages 8-11, 50% girls) across sadness, fear, and happiness contexts. We aimed to expand our understanding of ER strategies by (1) examining distraction as a regulatory strategy, (2) assessing discrete emotional contexts rather than aggregating negative emotions, and (3) including Latinx children, an underrepresented demographic in neuroscience and developmental work. Results showed that sadness elicited larger LPP amplitudes than other emotions, highlighting sadness as particularly salient emotion. ER strategies effectively reduced LPP amplitudes for sadness in the early processing window (300-700 ms) but failed to sustain this effect over time (700-3500 ms) and even appeared to intensify neural responses to sadness in later windows, suggesting developmental limitations in children's ability to maintain ER strategies across extended periods. Our findings add to existing work and offer novel and needed evidence of the discrete emotion-dependent effects of ER strategies on the LPP in children.