The Emotion-Regulation Benefits of Implicit Reappraisal in Clinical Depression:Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Major depressive disorder(MDD)is characterized by emotion dysregulation.Whether implicit emotion regulation can compensate for this deficit remains unknown.In this study,we recruited 159 subjects who were healthy controls,had subclinical depression,or had MDD,and examined them under baseline,implicit,and explicit reappraisal conditions.Explicit reappraisal led to the most negative feelings and the largest parietal late positive potential(parietal LPP,an index of emotion intensity)in the MDD group compared to the other two groups;the group difference was absent under the other two conditions.MDD patients showed larger regulatory effects in the LPP during implicit than explicit reappraisal,whereas healthy controls showed a reversed pattern.Furthermore,the frontal P3,an index of voluntary cognitive control,showed larger amplitudes in explicit reappraisal compared to baseline in the healthy and subclinical groups,but not in the MDD group,while implicit reappraisal did not increase P3 across groups.These findings suggest that implicit reappraisal is beneficial for clinical depression.

Implicit,But Not Explicit,Emotion Regulation Relieves Unpleasant Neural Responses Evoked by High-Intensity Negative Images

Evidence suggests that explicit reappraisal has limited regulatory effects on high-intensity emotions,mainly due to the depletion of cognitive resources occupied by the high-intensity emotional stimulus itself.The implicit form of reappraisal has proved to be resource-saving and therefore might be an ideal strategy to achieve the desired regulatory effect in high-intensity situations.In this study,we explored the regulatory effect of explicit and implicit reappraisal when participants encountered low-and high-intensity negative images.The subjective emotional rating indicated that both explicit and implicit reappraisal down-regulated negative experiences,irrespective of intensity.However,the amplitude of the parietal late positive potential(LPP;a neural index of experienced emotional intensity)showed that only implicit reappraisal had significant regulatory effects in the high-intensity context,though both explicit and implicit reappraisal successfully reduced the emotional neural responses elicited by low-intensity negative images.Meanwhile,implicit reappraisal led to a smaller frontal LPP amplitude(an index of cognitive cost)compared to explicit reappraisal,indicating that the implementation of implicit reappraisal consumes limited cognitive control resources.Furthermore,we found a prolonged effect of implicit emotion regulation introduced by training procedures.Taken together,these findings not only reveal that implicit reappraisal is suitable to relieve high-intensity negative experiences as well as neural responses,but also highlight the potential benefit of trained implicit regulation in clinical populations whose frontal control resources are limited.