title: Paying less but harvesting more: the effect of unconscious acceptance in regulating frustrating emotion.
abstract: Previous studies indicate that emotion regulation may occur unconsciously, without the cost of cognitive effort, while conscious acceptance may enhance negative experiences despite having potential long-term health benefits. Thus, it is important to overcome this weakness to boost the efficacy of the acceptance strategy in negative emotion regulation. As unconscious regulation occurs with little cost of cognitive resources, the current study hypothesizes that unconscious acceptance regulates the emotional consequence of negative events more effectively than does conscious acceptance. Subjects were randomly assigned to conscious acceptance, unconscious acceptance and no-regulation conditions. A frustrating arithmetic task was used to induce negative emotion. Emotional experiences were assessed on the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale while emotion- related physiological activation was assessed by heart-rate reactivity. Results showed that conscious acceptance had a significant negative affective consequence, which was absent during unconscious acceptance. That is, unconscious acceptance was linked with little reduction of positive affect during the experience of frustration, while this reduction was prominent in the control and conscious acceptance groups. Instructed, conscious acceptance resulted in a greater reduction of positive affect than found for the control group. In addition, both conscious and unconscious acceptance strategies significantly decreased emotion-related heart-rate activity (to a similar extent) in comparison with the control condition. Moreover, heart-rate reactivity was positively correlated with negative affect and negatively correlated with positive affect during the frustration phase relative to the baseline phase, in both the control and unconscious acceptance groups. Thus, unconscious acceptance not only reduces emotion-related physiological activity but also better protects mood stability compared with conscious acceptance. This suggests that the clinical practice of acceptance therapy may need to consider using the unconscious priming of an accepting attitude, instead of intentionally instructing people to implement such a strategy, to boost the efficacy of acceptance in emotion regulation.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China.
authors.forename: NanXiang
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.forename: JieMin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: YingYing
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: JiaJin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yuan
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005639:Frustration; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011603:Psychophysiology / Q000379:methods; D011897:Random Allocation; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult