No fear,no panic: probing negation as a means for emotion regulation

This electroencephalographic study investigated if negating one’s emotion results in paradoxical effects or leads to effective emotional downregulation. Healthy participants were asked to downregulate their emotions to happy and fearful faces by using negated emotional cue words (e.g. no fun, no fear). Cue words were congruent with the emotion depicted in the face and presented prior to each face. Stimuli were presented in blocks of happy and fearful faces. Blocks of passive stimulus viewing served as control condition. Active regulation reduced amplitudes of early event-related brain potentials (early posterior negativity, but not N170) and the late positive potential for fearful faces. A fronto-central negativity peaking at about 250 ms after target face onset showed larger amplitude modulations during downregulation of fearful and happy faces. Behaviorally, negating was more associated with reappraisal than with suppression. Our results suggest that in an emotional context, negation processing could be quite effective for emotional downregulation but that its effects depend on the type of the negated emotion (pleasant vs unpleasant). Results are discussed in the context of dual process models of cognition and emotion regulation.