Automatic Emotion Regulation

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Automatic Emotion Regulation
Iris B. Mauss,
1
* Silvia A. Bunge
2
and James J. Gross
3
1
University of Denver,
2
University of California, Berkeley
3
Stanford University
Abstract
How do people effectively regulate their emotional reactions? Why are some
people better at this than others? Most prior research has addressed these ques-
tions by focusing on deliberate forms of emotion regulation. We argue that this
focus has left out an important aspect of emotion regulation, namely, automatic
emotion regulation (AER). Our review of the behavioral literature suggests that
AER is pervasive in everyday life, and has far-reaching consequences for individuals’
emotions. However, the behavioral literature has yet to address the mechanisms
underlying the observed effects. Because it is difficult to directly measure the
processes involved in AER, evidence from neuroscientific studies is particularly
helpful in addressing these questions. Our review of the neuroscientific literature
suggests distinct neural bases for different types of AER, which provides important
clues about the cognitive and behavioral processes that might be involved in AER.
Remember the last time you were in a hurry but had to wait for the
driver in front of you to clumsily parallel park his car? Chances are that
in this situation (or others like it), you may have felt like honking or
yelling out of the car window. But did you actually do either of these
things? Probably not. You might have consciously told yourself to calm
down, determinedly gripping the steering wheel and clenching your
teeth. However, in many such instances – when you resist giving in to
emotional impulses – you do not do so consciously, but rather automati-
cally. Your habit of not venting your anger at incompetent drivers or your
familiarity with the well-learned rule not to shout angrily in public might
not even enter your mind.
Our goal in this article is to consider such automatic processes in
emotion regulation. We begin by defining emotion and emotion regulation,
and distinguishing between deliberate and automatic emotion regulation.
We argue that most recent research has focused on deliberate aspects of
emotion regulation, paying less attention to automatic aspects. We then
explain why we expect automatic emotion regulation (AER) to be impor-
tant for shaping individuals’ emotional responses and well-being. Next,
we review the empirical evidence on the experiential, behavioral, and
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Automatic Emotion Regulation
© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
physiological correlates of AER. This review suggests heterogeneous cor-
relates of AER, with some studies pointing to less adaptive and others
pointing to more adaptive correlates. These seemingly contradictory find-
ings might be explained by different types of AER that involve different
processes, and we suggest that neuroscientific methods are particularly
useful for understanding these processes. We then review the relevant
neuroscientific literature, focusing on the neural bases of different types of
AER.
Emotion and Emotion Regulation
Before we can understand emotion regulation, we need to define what we
mean by emotion. We define emotions as multifaceted, whole-body
responses that involve coordinated changes in the domains of subjective
experience, behavior, and peripheral physiology. Emotions arise when an indi-
vidual attends to a situation and evaluates it as relevant to his or her goals
(Frijda, 1988; Gross & Thompson, 2007). This definition presupposes a
chronological sequence of events, involving, first, a real or imaginary
situation; second, attention to and evaluation of the situation (appraisal)
by the individual; and, third, an emotional response. However, the emotion-
generative process cycles rapidly through these situation-evaluation-response
steps, and an individual’s responses in each cycle powerfully shape subse-
quent cycles of the emotion-generative process.
Appreciating that individuals are agentic beings rather than passive
emitters of their emotions, psychologists have become increasingly inter-
ested in the ways individuals attempt to regulate their emotional responses
(Gross, 2007). Emotion regulation may be defined as individuals’ deliber-
ate or automatic attempts to influence which emotions they have, when
they have them, and how these emotions are experienced or expressed.
Emotion regulation involves changes to one or more aspects of the
emotion, including the eliciting situation, attention, appraisals, subjective
experience, behavior, or physiology (e.g., Bargh & Williams, 2007; Gross
& Thompson, 2007). Emotion regulation may result in an emotional
response that is diminished or augmented either in amplitude or duration.
Because decreasing the duration or intensity of negative emotion appears
to be of particular importance for individuals (Gross, Richards, & John,
2006), and because most research has been done on this type of emotion
regulation, this will be our focus here.
The existing research on emotion regulation suggests that individual
differences in emotion regulation are associated with a range of important
outcomes in individuals’ lives (Diefendorff & Gosserand, 2003; Grandey,
2000; Gross et al., 2006; Gross & John, 2003; Mauss, Cook, Cheng, &
Gross, forthcoming). However, most research to date has focused on
deliberate emotion regulation. This is unfortunate, because AER might
have just as pervasive effects as deliberate emotion regulation (cf. Bargh &
© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Automatic Emotion Regulation
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Williams, 2007; Berkman & Lieberman, forthcoming; Davidson, MacGregor,
Stuhr, Dixon, & MacLean, 2000; Parkinson & Totterdell, 1999). Before
we will explore this hypothesis, we need to define AER, and explain why
we think it may be important.
Automatic Emotion Regulation
Most contemporary dual-process models contrast automatic (also called
nonconscious, implicit, or impulsive) processes with deliberate (also called
controlled, conscious, explicit, or reflective) processes (e.g., Chaiken &
Trope, 1999; Devine, 1989; Schacter, 1997; Sloman, 1996; Strack &
Deutsch, 2004). Deliberate processing requires attentional resources, is
volitional, and is driven by explicit goals. In contrast, automatic processing
is initiated by the simple registration of sensory inputs, which in turn
activates knowledge structures (schemas, scripts, or concepts) that then
shape other psychological functions. For many functions such as walking
or riding a bike, we do not hesitate to agree that they can be performed
automatically after they have been thoroughly learned. However, we hes-
itate to do so for so-called higher-level functions such as goal pursuit or
self-regulation. After all, until recently self-regulation was thought to be
squarely located in the realm of the willful, conscious, and deliberate
(cf. Bargh, 2004; Wegner, 2002). Thus, at first glance the concept of
automatic emotion regulation might seem oxymoronic.
However, research by Bargh and others (e.g., Bargh & Gollwitzer,
1994; Custers & Aarts, 2005; Glaser & Kihlstrom, 2005; Moskowitz,
Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999; Webb & Sheeran, 2003) on automatic
goal pursuit has challenged the notion that ‘higher-level’ processes can
only take place in a deliberate fashion. In a series of studies, Bargh and
colleagues have shown that goals can indeed be activated and executed
without the intervention of conscious awareness. For example, they have
primed goals such as the intention to cooperate with others, and found
that subsequently participants pursued these goals, without knowing why
or even that they were acting this way (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai,
Barndollar, & Trötschel, 2001). Bargh and colleagues explain these find-
ings by postulating that goals (including self-regulation goals) are mentally
represented in the same way as are other cognitive constructs. That is, goals
correspond to knowledge structures that contain information such as
when and how the goal should be pursued. Thus, the literature on auto-
matic goal pursuit provides theoretical and empirical precedence for AER.
Consistent with these considerations, we define AER as goal-driven
change to any aspect of one’s emotions without making a conscious
decision to do so, without paying attention to the process of regulating
one’s emotions, and without engaging in deliberate control. In other
words, AER is based on the automatic pursuit of the goal to alter the
emotion trajectory. We note that automatic and deliberate processes are
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Automatic Emotion Regulation
© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
ends on a continuum. Thus, while we contrast the two types of processes
for conceptual clarity, we acknowledge that many instances of emotion
regulation fall on a continuum between those two prototypes (e.g., intuitive
affect regulation; Koole & Jostmann, 2004).
Why should we care about AER? In our opening example, we
described how people might regulate their emotions without exerting delib-
erate efforts to do so. We believe that such instances of AER are pervasive
in individuals’ lives, because overlearned habits, regulatory strategies
learned early in childhood, sociocultural norms, and implicit hedonic
goals all engender automatic regulatory processes (e.g., Aarts & Dijksterhuis,
2000; Adams & Markus, 2004; Koole & Jostmann, 2004; Mauss, Bunge,
& Gross, forthcoming; Rothbaum, Pott, Azuma, Miyake, & Weisz, 2000;
Rudman, 2004). For example, individuals socialized to decrease emotional
responses from early childhood on (e.g., ‘Anger is destructive’ or ‘Loud
laughter is vulgar’) would be likely to automatically decrease their emotions,
without this norm even entering their awareness. Because these AER
processes are pervasive and because these processes appear to powerfully
shape individuals’ affective responses, it is of paramount importance to
understand what processes underlie them.
How does AER work, and what might be its consequences? We argue
that, just like deliberate emotion regulation, AER can involve changes at
all levels of the emotion process, including attention deployment (e.g., not
paying attention to an emotional situation), appraisal (e.g., altering of the
meaning of an emotional situation; engaging in particular beliefs about
the situation), cognitively engaging with or disengaging from (e.g., denying)
an emotional experience, and regulating emotional behaviors after an
emotion has been generated. Importantly, we believe that these processes
involve emotion regulation rather than simple emotion reactivity. This dis-
tinction holds important implications for the processes we observe. For
example, emotional reactivity may be much less malleable by sociocultural
factors than emotion regulation. In addition, this distinction is useful
because it helps us understand the affective consequences of different types
of AER. In our review, we provide initial evidence for this distinction.
However, we believe more research is needed to clarify the distinction
between emotion reactivity and emotion regulation (cf. Barrett, 2006;
Mesquita & Albert, 2007).
Empirical Findings: Maladaptive Consequences of AER
The concept of defenses and repression (e.g., Freud, 1936; Vaillant, 1977;
Weinberger, 1995) represents one of the earliest forms of AER. As for-
mulated by Freud, defensive inhibition of negative emotional experiences
is a form of AER that is motivated by the individual’s need to keep from
awareness emotions that are intolerably painful or incompatible with the
ideal self (Freud, 1930/1961). Freud took a negative view of this type of
© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Automatic Emotion Regulation
5
emotion regulation, postulating that this defensive ‘work’ would come at
the cost of expenditure of ‘psychic energy’.
Several studies support the concept of defenses (e.g., Vaillant, 1977;
Vaillant & McCullough, 1998). For example, Shedler, Mayman, and
Manis (1993) identified participants who reported experiencing little
negative emotion experience in general but whose early memories were
rated as showing signs of psychological disturbance. The investigators
categorized these participants as high in defensiveness. While undergoing
a mildly stressful task (e.g., reading aloud), defensive participants showed
more implicit signs of anxiety (e.g., stammering or avoiding the content
of the stimulus) than other participants. Importantly, defensive participants
also exhibited greater cardiovascular responding than other participants,
indicating that despite their low levels of self-reported negative emotion,
at some level they nonetheless exhibited greater reactivity.
The correlates of repression have been examined with similar paradigms
(e.g., Byrne, Golightly, & Sheffield, 1965; Erdelyi, 2001; Paulhus,
Fridhandler, & Hayes, 1997; Weinberger, Schwartz, & Davidson, 1979;
Weinberger, 1995). Studies indicate that participants high in repression
generally tend not to recognize and label negative emotions (Lane,
Sechrest, Riedel, Shapiro, & Kaszniak, 2000), and, when tested in labor-
atory emotion inductions, they tend to report experiencing less negative
emotion. At the same time, however, they exhibit impaired cognitive and
social skills, as well as greater physiological reactivity (e.g., Asendorpf &
Scherer, 1983; Brosschot & Janssen, 1998; Schwartz, 1995; Weinberger,
1995). These studies suggest that AER is correlated with a relatively
maladaptive response profile.
In a similar vein, Shaver and Mikulincer (2007) describe how individ-
uals with avoidant attachment styles (individuals who habitually avoid
close emotional relationships) might have learned as children that the
expression of negative emotion is ineffective or counterproductive with
respect to attachment figures (Cassidy, 1994). By extension, such individ-
uals learn to inhibit negative emotional impulses (cf. Kobak, Cole,
Ferenz-Gillies, & Fleming, 1993; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003), a process
that becomes automatized over time. In support of this hypothesis, avoid-
ant individuals show relatively blunted emotional experience in automatic
tasks such as affective lexical decision tasks (Mikulincer, Birnbaum, Woddis,
& Nachmias, 2000). They thus seem to be able to deny negative emo-
tional impulses automatically. Crucially, this process might not entirely
resolve their negative emotional reactions, and might incur some hidden
cost. For example, Dozier and Kobak (1992) monitored electrodermal
responses while participants recalled memories involving separation or
rejection. They found that avoidant individuals had more difficulty gen-
erating negative memories. At the same time, they showed increased
physiological reactivity during the task, suggesting that there might be an
affective cost for cognitive disengagement from emotions.
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© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
In addition to these negative effects of cognitive disengagement from
emotional impulses, there is evidence that automatic behavioral regulation
might also have relatively maladaptive consequences for individuals. For
example, Egloff, Schmukle, Burns, and Schwerdtfeger (2006) examined
the correlates of spontaneous behavioral suppression in a laboratory speech
stressor. They did not give participants instructions to regulate their emo-
tions, thus, maximizing automaticity of emotion regulation during the
speech. In order to gauge spontaneous behavioral regulation, participants
rated after the speech to what extent they had behaviorally inhibited their
emotions. Spontaneous behavioral inhibition was found to be unrelated
to experience of negative emotions but was associated with greater phys-
iological responding.
Together, the studies on repression and on spontaneous suppression
suggest that AER (specifically by way of cognitive disengagement and
behavioral regulation) plays an important role in individuals’ affective
responses, and that overall it is relatively maladaptive. This last conclusion
is somewhat surprising for two reasons. First, the recent work on auto-
matic goal pursuit (e.g., Bargh & Gollwitzer, 1994; Jackson et al., 2003;
Moon & Lord, 2006; Webb & Sheeran, 2003) suggests that automatic
processes are executed relatively effortlessly and efficiently. Second, at least
in its unqualified form, the notion that AER is maladaptive is rendered
implausible by the existence of at least some individuals who manage to
lead quite composed lives without the ‘side effects’ of AER indicated
above.
Empirical Findings: Adaptive Consequences of AER
Might some types of AER be adaptive? Three recent areas of research
suggest that the answer to this question may be ‘yes’. First, in explaining
the positivity effect, which refers to the fact that as individuals grow older,
they experience and remember relatively more positive emotions,
Carstensen and Mikels (2005) invoke automatic regulatory processes.
They argue that since deliberate processing deteriorates in older age, it is
likely that automatic emotion regulatory processing is responsible for the
positivity effect. Indeed, the positivity effect has been documented in a
number of relatively automatic affective tasks, such as the dot probe task.
In these tasks, older relative to younger participants tend to automatically
shift their attention away from negative and toward positive emotional
stimuli (e.g., Isaacowitz, Wadlinger, Goren, & Wilson, 2006a, 2006b;
Mather & Carstensen, 2003). Thus, older individuals might make use of
AER to their advantage.
Second, a series of studies suggests that action orientation might be
accompanied by relatively automatic emotion regulation (‘intuitive affect
regulation’), which is flexible and very effective (Koole & Coenen, 2007;
Koole & Jostmann, 2004; Kuhl, 1981). Action orientation is the tendency
© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Automatic Emotion Regulation
7
to respond to stress with actions designed to resolve the problem rather
than to dwell on the negative affect accompanying those situations. In a
series of studies, it was shown that action-oriented individuals are able to
quickly decrease negative affect in demanding situations (Koole &
Coenen; Koole & Jostmann). The authors argue that because action
orientation is a stable individual difference, any regulatory functions asso-
ciated with it should be well practiced and, thus, relatively automatic. In
fact, studies demonstrate that action-oriented individuals are even able to
decrease negative affect in subliminal (e.g., Jostmann, Koole, van der
Wulp, & Fockenberg, 2005) as well as in affective priming tasks (Koole &
Jostmann; Study 2), supporting the view that the type of emotion regu-
lation that accompanies action orientation has automatic components.
Third, Bonanno and his colleagues have provided data suggesting that
repressive coping can promote resilience. For example, they have shown
that repressive coping, as measured by the discrepancy between affective
experience and sympathetic nervous system response, may promote recov-
ery following extremely stressful events such as the death of one’s spouse
(Bonanno, 2005; Bonanno, Keltner, Holen, & Horowitz, 1995; Bonanno,
Znoj, Siddique, & Horowitz, 1999). A study examining the correlates of
repressive coping more generally indicates that individuals who habitually
use repressive coping as compared to those who do not tend to have fewer
symptoms of psychopathology, fewer health problems and somatic com-
plaints, and are rated as better adjusted by close friends (Coifman, Bonanno,
Ray, & Gross, 2007). In all these studies, repressive coping was inversely
or not related to deliberate measures of avoidant coping, supporting the
interpretation that repressive coping is relatively automatic.
These areas of research are intriguing, but they are limited in some
ways. Most notably, in many of these studies, AER was inferred rather
than directly measured. This consideration led us to conduct a study
aimed to provide a more direct measure of individual differences in AER.
In developing this measure, we reasoned that the automatic goal of regu-
lating emotion might be associated with an implicit positive evaluation of
emotion regulation (cf. Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000; Custers & Aarts,
2005). Thus, we developed a variant of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
(cf. Egloff, Wilhelm, Neubauer, Mauss, & Gross, 2002; Fazio & Olson,
2003; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) to assess individual differ-
ences in implicit evaluation of emotion regulation (emotion regulation
IAT; ER-IAT). The ER-IAT assesses participants’ implicit evaluations of
emotion control versus emotion expression by measuring reaction times
to positive (e.g., gold), negative (e.g., gloom), emotion control (e.g.,
controlled), and emotion expression (e.g., expressive) words. A relatively
stronger association between emotion control and positive items implies
implicit positive evaluation of emotion control. Because goal states that
are associated with positive concepts appear to enhance individuals’
pursuit of these goals (e.g., Custers & Aarts), we reasoned that this
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© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
association might lead to a greater likelihood of engaging in automatic
emotion control.
In order to put this hypothesis to the test we assessed whether positive
implicit evaluation of emotion control would be associated with experi-
ential, behavioral, and cardiovascular responses to a laboratory anger
provocation (Mauss, Evers, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2006, Study 2). Anger
experience as well as cardiovascular responding, including sympathetic
activation, cardiac output, and total peripheral resistance, were assessed. In
order to control for the involvement of effortful emotion control, partic-
ipants were asked after the task to what extent they had tried to control
their emotions. While most participants became angry during the provo-
cation, those who had greater ER-IAT scores reported relatively less anger
experience. In addition, they exhibited a relatively adaptive challenge
cardiovascular activation pattern (as opposed to a threat pattern), charac-
terized by greater sympathetic activation, greater cardiac output, and lower
total peripheral resistance (cf. Tomaka, Blascovich, Kelsey, & Leitten,
1993). Apparently, the relative reduction of anger experience happened
without conscious effort, because ER-IAT scores were not correlated
with self-reported effortful emotion control. In summary, these findings
indicate that greater positive implicit evaluation of emotion control is
associated with affective responses that are consistent with automatic,
successful, and physiologically adaptive emotion regulation.
These correlational results beg the question of what causal role AER
plays. Because very few studies have addressed this question to date, we
devised an experimental manipulation of AER in order to assess its affec-
tive consequences (Mauss, Cook, & Gross, forthcoming). We manipulated
AER in two studies by priming emotion control versus emotion expression
with an adaptation of the sentence unscrambling task (e.g., Bargh et al.,
2001; Srull & Wyer, 1979). This task unobtrusively exposed participants
to words relating to emotion control (e.g., cool, contain) or expression
(e.g., boil, show), thereby implicitly activating (priming)-related concepts
and goals. Three domains of affective responding were measured: anger
experience, global negative emotion experience (including anxiety and
sadness), and cardiovascular responses.
Results revealed that indeed priming different emotion regulation con-
cepts affected subsequent emotional responding, such that participants
primed with emotion control reported less anger than did participants
primed with emotion expression. Importantly, participants primed with
emotion control reported experiencing lesser global negative emotion
experience than those primed with emotion expression and did not
exhibit more maladaptive cardiovascular responding. Participants primed
with emotion expression exhibited emotional responses equal to or
greater than during a prior unprimed anger induction, suggesting that the
emotion control rather than the emotion expression condition led to the
observed group differences. These results imply that, like the individual
© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Automatic Emotion Regulation
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difference process associated with the ER-IAT, situationally induced AER
is not costly.
One important question about the differences in anger observed in
these studies is whether emotion regulation rather than mere emotional
reactivity is responsible for them. Because the key processes involved here
are automatic, it is difficult to come to a conclusive answer to this ques-
tion. However, two pieces of evidence make it plausible that regulation
rather than reactivity is involved in the present findings. First, the words
used in the ER-IAT (e.g., controlled, expressive) and in the priming tasks
(e.g., contain, show) tap into emotion regulation rather than reactivity.
Second, the fact that ER-IAT scores were positively correlated with sym-
pathetic activation makes it more plausible that regulation rather than
mere differences in reactivity was involved, because lower anger reactivity
would have been associated with lower levels of sympathetic activation.
Likewise, had there been mere differences in anger reactivity between the
experimental groups in the priming studies, the group who reported less
anger would have likely exhibited less cardiovascular responding as well.
Reconciling Conflicting Findings: Toward a Model of AER
Together, these studies raise the intriguing possibility that people can –
without conscious effort – remain calm, cool, and collected in powerfully
negative situations. The relative adaptiveness of this type of AER stands
in contrast to the maladaptiveness of the AER processes described in the
preceding section. How can these conflicting findings be reconciled?
One way to reconcile these findings is to argue that there exist different
types of AER, each with a different pattern of affective consequences.
More specifically, as summarized in Figure 1, it appears that cognitive
disengagement from emotional impulses as well as behavioral regulation
are associated with a more maladaptive profile of outcomes. These types
of AER appear to be involved in defensiveness, repression, and sponta-
neous suppression. On the other hand, individual habits, values, or goals
such as those tapped into by the ER-IAT or manipulated by priming
procedures appear to have generally adaptive affective consequences.
These processes appear to involve changes of emotional situations, attention
paid to such situations, or appraisals of those situations.
But what about these processes make them adaptive or maladaptive?
With the existing evidence, we cannot conclusively answer this question.
However, the pattern of responses suggests that individuals using cognitive
disengagement and behavioral regulation might exhibit an emotional
response at some point, which is then decreased. As the right panel in
Figure 1 illustrates, these processes could be considered ‘response-focused’
regulation, in that they occur after the emotional response has been trig-
gered (cf. Gross, 1998; Gross & Thompson, 2007). Because some aspects
of the emotional response continue to be active in this sequence, they
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Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
might evoke some conflict about the emotion or some continued regula-
tory effort. On the other hand, implicit positive evaluation of emotion
regulation and situationally primed values about emotions might be
activated early in the emotional response. As the left panel in Figure 1
illustrates, they might thus operate in a more ‘antecedent-focused’ man-
ner, without ever evoking a conflict about the emotion and effectively
decreasing all aspects of the emotional response (cf. Gross; Gross &
Thompson). By extension, they are expected to have a relatively adaptive
profile of responses. Thus, the distinction of different types of AER might
have important implications for individuals’ well-being and psychological
health.
However, the studies described above are mainly based on self-reported
data or relatively nonspecific measures of peripheral physiological
responding. Thus, they do not conclusively tell us whether different types
of AER engage different processes. Neuroscientific studies, which afford
unique insights into the mechanisms underlying different behavioral
outcomes, might be better suited to address this question. In the next
sections, we review relevant neuroscientific evidence. Guided by the stud-
ies reviewed above, we focus on cognitive disengagement and behavioral
regulation as instances of response-focused AER, and habit- or value-
based regulation as instances of antecedent-focused AER. Because very
Figure 1
Regulatory mechanisms, affective consequences, and neural correlates of automatic
emotion regulation (AER).
© 2007 The Authors
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Automatic Emotion Regulation
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few neuroscientific studies have directly examined AER, we reference a
number of related constructs such as denial or automatic behavior pro-
grams. Evidence from these constructs is suggestive and helps generate
useful hypotheses. However, more direct neuroscientific assessments will
be necessary in the future to develop a more definitive model of AER.
The Neural Correlates of Response-Focused AER
The bottom right row of Figure 1 summarizes brain areas that might be
involved in response-focused types of AER. One recent study by Gillath,
Bunge, Shaver, Wendelken, and Mikulincer (2005) was aimed at explor-
ing the neural correlates of emotion regulation in individuals with differ-
ent attachment styles. In this study, participants were first instructed to
consider negative scenarios such as an imminent break-up or death of a
partner, and then to suppress thoughts about these negative scenarios.
Across individuals, attachment avoidance (the tendency to avoid close
emotional relationships) was found to be positively correlated with acti-
vation of one of the main brain regions implicated in state-dependent
mood changes (Liotti, Mayberg, McGinnis, Brannan, & Jerabek, 2002):
the subcallosal cingulate cortex (SCC; Brodmann’s area 25, part of the
subgenual cortex). The SCC projects to subcortical structures including
the hypothalamus, and brainstem regions including the periaqueductal
gray. These Regions are involved in autonomic functions, including heart
rate, respiration, skin conductance, as well as in automatic defense reactions,
such as escape (Rempel-Clower & Barbas, 1998; Freedman, Insel, &
Smith, 2000). The SCC also projects to the dorsal raphe nuclei in the
brainstem, and is therefore in a position to influence mood through
the regulation of serotonergic neurotransmission throughout the brain
(Freedman et al., 2000).
In the study by Gillath et al. (2005), participants low in attachment
avoidance exhibited suppression of the SCC during the thought suppres-
sion phase relative to the thought phase, whereas participants high in
attachment avoidance showed relatively elevated SCC activation. Greater
activation of the SCC by the amygdala is also observed in posttraumatic
stress disorder (Gilboa et al., 2004). Conversely, Mayberg and colleagues
have proposed that sustained suppression of the SCC is necessary for full
recovery from unipolar depression (Davidson, 2002; Drevets, 2001; Gotlib
et al., 2005; Liotti et al., 2002; Mayberg, 2003; Shin, Kosslyn, McNally,
& Alpert, 1997), and fear extinction in healthy participants is associated
with progressively greater suppression of the SCC (Phelps, Delgado, Nearing,
& LeDoux, 2004). Although the neural mechanisms underlying SCC
suppression versus activation are not yet clear, these findings suggest that
suppression of the SCC is involved in an adaptive, and perhaps automatic,
form of emotion regulation, while relative activation of SCC might be
associated with (or indicative of ) a more maladaptive form of AER.
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Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Which brain regions might support processes related to the second type
of response-focused AER, namely, behavioral regulation of emotional
impulses (e.g., keeping one’s face still while sad)? No direct evidence exists
specifically for the automatic regulation of emotional behaviors in
humans, but four different areas appear to be good candidates. First, the
animal literature gives us some clues. As noted above, specific hypotha-
lamic and brainstem structures control automatic behaviors. For example,
stimulation of the periaqueductal gray and hypothalamus in animals elicits
automatic defense reactions like threats, vocalizations, and escape (Freed-
man et al., 2000). As suggested above, frontally mediated control over
these regions would lead to regulation of specific behaviors associated
with emotional responses. However, direct evidence for this hypothesis
with respect to the regulation of emotional impulses in humans is lacking.
Second, clues relating to response-focused AER may come from the
literature on motor control. Knowledge structures such as behavioral
scripts come to be associated with specific behaviors (cf. Bunge, 2004;
Donohue, Wendelken, Crone, & Bunge, 2005; Engelkamp, 1986; Farah
& McClelland, 1991), for example, through acculturation and socializa-
tion. In line with this idea, Grafton, Fadiga, Arbib, and Rizzolatti (1997)
showed that viewing graspable objects without any intent to use them was
associated with activation of the left dorsal premotor cortex, suggesting
that motor programs were automatically activated. In addition to the
dorsal premotor cortex, studies suggest that parts of the parietal lobe are
associated with implicitly activated motor programs (Decety & Grèzes,
1999; Jeannerod, Arbib, Rizzolatti, & Sakata, 1995; Johnson-Frey, 2004;
Martin, Haxby, Lalonde, & Wiggs, 1995; Milner & Goodale, 1995;
Tettamanti et al., 2005, for a meta-analysis). Thus, through its projections
to the dorsal premotor cortex the areas within the parietal cortex might
initiate behaviors without conscious intent.
Third, much of the workings of the motor systems seem to be opaque
to our introspection because there are simply too many individual muscles
and movements to keep track of each one (Prinz, 2003). For example, a
review by Picard and Strick (1996) supports this dissociation between
knowing and doing, by making the point that the pre-supplementary
motor area is associated with the conscious and effortful learning of a skill
while the supplementary motor area is associated with automatic actions
(Sakai et al., 1999). This finding suggests that some automatic behavioral
responses to an emotion may be mediated by the supplementary motor
area.
A fourth important structure in the automatic initiation and execution
of motor programs is the lateral cerebellum. For example, Thach (1996)
speculates that this region may be involved in combining behavioral ele-
ments into more complex actions in specific contexts ‘such that, through
practice, an experiential context can automatically evoke an action plan’
(p. 429). The cerebellum may thus link the representations of specific
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Social and Personality Psychology Compass 1 (2007): 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00005.x
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Automatic Emotion Regulation
13
behavioral contexts with the relevant premotor, lower-level movement
generators. In this way, complex behavior can be automatically mapped
onto, and guided by, specific cues.
The Neural Correlates of Antecedent-Focused AER
What brain areas might support antecedent-focused AER? As summarized
in the bottom left row of Figure 1, several recent studies suggest the
potential involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), especially lateral
and medial portions, lateral and ventromedial portions of the prefrontal
cortex (lPFC and vmPFC), and the basal ganglia (BG). These regions
have been implicated in emotion regulation, cognition–emotion interac-
tions, top-down direction of attention in response to negative emotional
stimuli, and encoding affective expectations in relation to conditioned
stimuli (Beer, Heerey, Keltner, Scabini, & Knight, 2003; Davidson, 2002;
Elliott, Dolan, & Frith, 2000; Gottfried, O’Doherty, & Dolan, 2003;
Hamann, Ely, Hoffman, & Kilts, 2002; Lieberman, 2000; Rolls, 2000).
A recent study on agreeableness (Haas, Omura, Constable, & Canli,
2007) suggests that the lPFC, which has been associated with deliberate
emotion regulation (Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002), might also
be associated with AER. Agreeableness is a stable personality trait that is
associated with prosocial behaviors and positive affect. These states might
plausibly be achieved via antecedent-focused AER. For example, a study
by Meier, Robinson, and Wilkowski (2006) showed agreeableness to be
associated with automatic activation of prosocial thoughts in response to
negative affective cues. In the recent neuroimaging study, agreeableness
was positively correlated with right lPFC activation during performance
of a task that exposed individuals to negative emotional stimuli without
requiring them to regulate their emotions or even pay attention to the
emotional nature of the stimuli (Haas et al., 2007). Together, these find-
ings support that the lPFC may be involved in antecedent-focused AER.
The study by Gillath et al. (2005) described above supports the notion
that lateral portions of the OFC are additionally involved in antecedent-
focused AER. Recall that the researchers instructed participants to con-
sider negative scenarios such as death of a partner (thought trials), and
subsequently to suppress thoughts about these negative scenarios
(thought-suppression trials). Participants low in attachment anxiety (those
who habitually respond with relatively little negative emotion to relation-
ship conflict) as compared to participants high in attachment anxiety
exhibited lower activation of the anterior temporal pole, a brain region
associated with sadness. Interestingly, these participants exhibited greater
activation of the lateral OFC (BA11) during the thought trials as well as
the thought-suppression trials, such that anterior temporal pole activation
was negatively correlated with lateral OFC activation across participants.
These findings suggest that participants low in attachment anxiety might
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engage in emotion regulatory processes supported by the OFC automat-
ically – whether or not they are instructed to do so – and that these
processes are quite effective.
The OFC and portions of the anterior cingulate cortex have also been
implicated in AER by a recent study by Westen, Kilts, Blagov, Harenski,
and Hamann (2006). They presented political partisans with stimuli
regarding either George W. Bush or his challenger John Kerry (the study
took place during the months preceding the 2004 presidential election).
Participants considered statements that documented contradictions
between their candidate’s words and deeds (suggesting that the candidate
was lying). Next, participants were asked to rate the extent to which the
candidate’s words and actions were contradictory. Presumably, when
examining their own candidate, partisan participants could regulate potential
negative affect by denying the presence of a contradiction.
As expected, many participants did just that: they had no difficulty
detecting contradictions in the opposing candidate but simply denied
contradictions for their own candidate. Because they probably wouldn’t
say to themselves ‘I will deny that there is a contradiction here’, and
because the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), which has been asso-
ciated with explicit and deliberate forms of ER (Hariri, Mattay, Tessitore,
Fera, & Weinberger, 2003; Ochsner et al., 2002), was not involved in the
processes, it seems plausible to assume that this process is relatively auto-
matic. When first considering the contradictory statements, participants
exhibited activation in amygdala and insula, which suggests there was an
initial negative affective response. In addition, when they resolved the
contradiction, they exhibited activation throughout the OFC (specifically
medial and lateral portions) as well as the anterior and posterior cingulate
cortices. Together, these results support the notion that these regions are
involved in AER.
The OFC is further implicated in AER by studies involving patients
with focal brain damage. In a study by Beer, John, Scabini, and Knight
(2006), patients with OFC damage were able to state explicitly what they
needed to do to accomplish a regulation goal (e.g., inhibit the tendency
to share personal information with a stranger). However, when faced with
an actual situation that required regulation, they were not able to regulate
their behavior to conform to the stated goal. This finding further supports
that the OFC is involved in automatic aspects of emotion regulation.
A recent event-related potential study by Carretié, Hinojosa, Mercado,
and Tapia (2005) supports the notion that the vmPFC may also be
involved in antecedent-focused AER. Their study indicates that the
vmPFC is activated in response to unconsciously presented fear stimuli.
Because the vmPFC is generally related to top-down allocation of atten-
tion, this finding suggests that the vmPFC might be involved in regulatory
processes even in response to unconsciously presented stimuli, and before
an emotional response has become conscious.
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Automatic Emotion Regulation
15
An additional neural structure that might plausibly be involved in
antecedent-focused AER is the BG. The BG is a promising candidate for
a specific central neural correlate of AER because it is associated with
implicit learning (Frank, O’Reilly, & Curran, 2006; Grafton, Hazeltine,
& Ivry, 1995; Keele, Ivry, Mayr, Hazeltine, & Heuer, 2003), procedural
memory (Grafton, Mazziotta, Presty, & Friston, 1992; Grafton, Woods, &
Tyszka, 1994), as well as habit learning and automatic execution of motor
programs (Graybiel & Saka, 2004; Poldrack & Gabrieli, 2001; Poldrack
et al., 2005). Thus, generally, the BG appears to be involved in automatic
rather than deliberate processes. The BG might plausibly support motor,
cognitive, and affective processes via the motor, the limbic, or the OFC
circuits (cf. Lieberman, 2000, 2007). In addition, it appears to be involved
in processes that occur in response to predictors of events rather than
relevant events themselves (e.g., Lieberman, 2000), which makes it plau-
sible that it is involved in antecedent AER. For instance, it might support
responses to situational cues that alert an individual to an impending
emotional situation, which can then be dealt with before it even arouses
strong emotional responses.
While no research has directly assessed the involvement of the BG in
AER, patient research supports this hypothesis. For example, patients with
Parkinson’s disease, especially those with prominent deterioration of the
caudate, exhibit disinhibition symptoms (e.g., Brandt & Butters, 1996;
Shelton, Shelton, & Knopman, 1991). Similarly, patients with caudate
infarcts have been shown to exhibit disinhibition, impulsive behaviors,
and heightened anxiety (Mendez, Adams, & Lewandowski, 1989). While
no studies are available yet that disentangle automatic activation from
regulation of emotions, the available evidence is consistent with the
hypothesis that the BG might support AER.
Concluding Comment
Our review of the behavioral literature suggests that AER sometimes is
associated with a maladaptive pattern of responses, but at other times is
associated with an adaptive pattern of responses. One way to reconcile
these divergent findings is to assume that different processes underlie dif-
ferent types of AER. Specifically, we have argued that it may be useful to
distinguish response-focused AER, including cognitive disengagement
from emotional stimuli and behavioral regulation after the emotion has
arisen, from antecedent-focused AER, which occurs early in the emo-
tional sequences. Antecedent-focused AER might involve changing
situations, attentional deployment, and appraisals of situations, and might
be based more on individuals’ habits and values regarding emotional situ-
ations. As summarized in Figure 1, neuroimaging studies suggest that
these different types of AER may have separable neural correlates. Specif-
ically, response-focused AER might be supported by the SCC (cognitive
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Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
disengagement) and the dorsal pathway and the cerebellum and/or prefrontal
regions operating on subcortical and brainstem structures (behavioral
regulation), and antecedent-focused AER might be supported by circuits
involving lateral and medial portions of the OFC, the lPFC, and vmPFC,
the anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, and portions of the BG.
We hope that by providing a conceptual framework for AER and its
neural bases, the present overview can help us better understand a per-
vasive process with important implications for individuals’ well-being and
health.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Cendri Hutcherson, Rebecca Ray,
Catherine Reed, and Amanda Shallcross for their help with this article.
Short Biography
Iris Mauss received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford University, and
is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Denver.
Her research focuses on emotions and emotion regulation, and utilizes a
multimethod approach, including experience sampling, behavioral coding,
implicit measures, and measures of autonomic physiological responses.
Her work addresses questions concerning coherence versus dissociation of
emotional response systems, the sociocultural context of emotion regula-
tion, the implications of emotion regulation for psychological and physical
health, and automatic processes in emotion regulation.
Silvia Bunge received her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford Univer-
sity, and went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of
Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She then spent over 3 years on the
faculty at the University of California, Davis, before moving to a joint
faculty position in Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Insti-
tute at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Bunge studies the
brain mechanisms underlying the control of thoughts, actions, and
emotions.
James Gross received his PhD in clinical psychology from the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley. He is currently an Associate Professor in the
Department of Psychology at Stanford University, and Director of the
Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. His research focuses on emotion
and emotion regulation processes in healthy and clinical populations using
behavioral, autonomic, and functional magnetic resonance imaging measures.
Endnote
* Correspondence address: Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO
80208, USA. Email: imauss@psy.du.edu.
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Automatic Emotion Regulation
17
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