UC Irvine

Emotion regulation is an important process for attaining desired emotional states and has been linked to a number of key behavioral and health outcomes. Being able to successfully regulate emotions depends on several factors including the types of strategy used and the goals of regulation. This dissertation extended what is currently known about emotion regulation by examining how cognitive reappraisal, one of the most widely studied and effective strategies used to regulate emotion, influences different physiological outcomes through a meta-analysis. Moderators of the relationships between cognitive reappraisal and physiology were also investigated. The second study of the dissertation further examined how emotion regulation goals, such as regulating with a qualitative regulation goal (i.e., regulate the valence dimension of emotions) or with a quantitative regulation goal (i.e., arousal dimension of emotions), influenced physiological changes through an experimental paradigm. Results from the meta-analysis provided evidence that cognitive reappraisal had a significant effect on eye movement measures. Across the 73 experimental studies analyzed, the use of cognitive reappraisal strategies also had a stronger effect on regulation of negative versus positive emotions. The effect of cognitive reappraisal was also stronger in younger versus older populations. In the second experimental study, results found that compared with a quantitative regulation goal, individuals regulating with a qualitative regulation goal reported higher blood pressure. Individuals also displayed significant within person variations in skin conductance and respiratory responses when regulating with a qualitative, but not a quantitative goal. Overall findings from this dissertation demonstrated that both regulation strategies and goals are important for shaping different physiological changes and health. Findings provide insights on several factors that could influence the effect of cognitive reappraisal on different physiology compared with other strategies. For instance, the regulatory goal one has, the types of emotion being regulated, and person characteristics like age. Being the first study to investigate the differential effect of regulatory goals on physiology, results suggest the importance of measuring not just how to move away from current emotions, but also how to arrive at our target emotional states to achieve different physiological outcomes. Results also suggest a new research direction to examine the effect of regulatory goals on not only the physiological, but other components of emotions.