Voluntary Emotion Suppression Modifies Psychophysiological Responses to Films

A fundamental aspect of successful social interaction is the fact people do not always experience or express emotions to their fullest extent but instead control them in a context-dependent manner. Emotion regulation involves the manipulation of subjective experience, behavior, and physiology. Previous researches have studied autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses during emotion regulation using only positive and negative stimuli without distinguishing between emotions, or it has focused on one specific emotion. Given the differences of ANS reactions to different categories of emotional stimuli, our study aims at comparing the physiological activity during emotion attending and emotion suppression using specific and distinct categories of emotions. Fifty subjects were presented with five films, inducing one of five emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, peacefulness, and disgust. While viewing the films, participants were instructed to perform an attending and a suppression task. We evaluated the following physiological measures as participants engaged in these tasks: skin conductance response (SCR), heart rate (HR), and activity of zygomatic and corrugator muscles. Performing a suppression task when viewing the happy and disgusting film clips resulted in diminished, respectively, zygomatic and corrugator muscle activities. Emotion regulation leads to a lower HR when viewing the happy film, and a higher SCR when viewing the fear-inducing film. The effects of emotional control on EMG and HR are observed on the emotions that drive the most important physiological changes in the noncontrol setting, while the increased SCR for the fear-inducing film indicates that the conscious and volitional regulation of emotion has selective effect on fear emotion as compared to happiness, disgust, sadness, and peacefulness.