Emotion Regulation in Adulthood: Timing Is Everything

Emotions seem to come and go as they please. However, we actually hold considerable sway over our emotions: We influence which emotions we have and how we experience and express these emotions. The process model of emotion regulation described here suggests that how we regulate our emotions matters. Regulatory strategies that act early in the emotion-generative process should have quite different outcomes than strategies that act later. This review focuses on two widely used strategies for down-regulating emotion. The first, reappraisal, comes early in the emotion-generative process. It consists of changing how we think about a situation in order to decrease its emotional impact. The second, suppression, comes later in the emotion-generative process. It involves inhibiting the outward signs of emotion. Theory and research suggest that reappraisal is more effective than suppression. Reappraisal decreases the experience and behavioral expression of emotion, and has no impact on memory. By contrast, suppression decreases behavioral expression, but fails to decrease the experience of emotion, and actually impairs memory. Suppression also increases physiological responding in both the suppressors and their social partners.     

Prenatal testosterone treatment potentiates the aggression‐inhibiting effect of the neurosteroid dehydroepiandrosterone in female mice

The neurosteroid dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is a powerful inhibitor of aggression in murine models when given for 15 days and potentially may be useful in the management of inappropriate human aggression. Although the biosynthesis and metabolism of DHEA have been described, little is known about the potential effect of the steroidal environment during sexual differentiation on the subsequent response to DHEA. Whether prenatal androgen exposure influences the subsequent response to DHEA was assessed by comparing the effect of DHEA (80 μg/d) on aggression in female offspring where dams were treated with 1, 10, or 100 μg of testosterone (T) on days 15 to 18 of gestation (Experiment I) or that developed in different uterine positions (Experiment II). The results showed that DHEA decreased attack behavior in general and that the 100‐μg prenatal T treatments enhanced the antiaggressive effect of this neurosteroid. Neither the lower doses of exogenously administered T nor the uterine position led to an enhanced response to DHEA. In addition, whether DHEA produced changes in social and nonsocial activities was examined. In the 100‐μg T females, DHEA increased the duration of the former and decreased the frequency and duration of the latter, indicating that it was not a general decrement in behavioral expression that mediated the enhanced response to the antiaggressive effect of DHEA. In the second experiment, DHEA treatment led to increased frequencies of social nonaggressive and nonsocial activities. However, the uterine positions × treatment interactions were not significant, demonstrating that contiguity to male fetuses did not differentially affect the response to DHEA. Aggr. Behav. 27:130–138, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

An aggression machine v. determinants in reactive aggression revisited

The relations between reactive aggression, situational cues, and emotion regulation were examined by means of the Pulkkinen Aggression Machine (PAM) task. In the PAM, provocation and response were systematically varied under two conditions: the impulsive aggression condition and the controlled aggression condition. In the impulsive condition, no information about the attacker was provided, while in the controlled condition the attackers were specified in terms of sex, age, and physical strength. The task was administered to 109 children aged 8 to 13 years. Boys (n = 61) and girls (n = 48), as well as subgroups of Adjusted (n = 67) and Maladjusted (n = 26) children were compared. The results confirmed earlier findings showing that there is a strong relationship between attack and response intensity. However, this relationship was consistently modified by the effects of situation and personality‐related variables. This meant that, while for the impulsive condition response intensity was closely tied to stimulus intensity, in the controlled condition this effect was modulated by the characteristics of the opponent: the more equal the opponent the stronger the retaliations displayed. The Maladjusted children reacted more intensively in the impulsive condition and to minor provocation in the controlled condition than the Adjusted children. This suggests that the intensity of the elicited aggression in the Maladjusted group was particularly dependent on contextual rather than internal control. Aggr. Behav. 27:430–445, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

国内外农村医疗保障的政府规制比较分析

运用政府规制理论，从政府规制机构、政府规制标准和对筹资的规制三个方面对国内外农村医疗保障中的政府规制进行比较分析，从而启发我们要精简规制机构，提高规制效率；完善规制标准，提高规制效力；用法律来规制各级政府对医疗保障补助资金的转移支付。     

Motivational effects of smoked marijuana: behavioral contingencies and low-probability activities.

Six adult male research volunteers, in two groups of 3 subjects each, lived in a residential laboratory for 15 days. All contact with the experimenters was through a networked computer system, and subjects' behavior was monitored continuously and recorded. During the first part of each day, they were allowed to socialize. Two cigarettes containing active marijuana (2.7% delta 9-THC) or placebo were smoked during the private work period and the period of access to social activities. Three-day contingency conditions requiring subjects to engage in a low-probability work activity (instrumental activity) in order to earn time that could be spent engaging in a high-probability work activity (contingent activity) were programmed during periods of placebo and active-marijuana smoking. During placebo administration, the contingency requirement reliably increased the amount of time that subjects spent engaged in the low-probability instrumental activity and decreased the time spent engaged in the high-probability activity. During active-marijuana administration, however, the increases in instrumental activity were consistently larger than observed under placebo conditions. The decreases in contingent activity were similar to those seen under placebo conditions. Smoking active marijuana was thus observed to produce increments in instrumental activity under motivational conditions involving contingencies for "work activities."     

On the distinction between open and closed economies.

Open and closed economies have been assumed to produce opposite relations between responding and the programmed density of reward (the amount of reward divided by its cost). Experimental procedures that are treated as open economies typically dissociate responding and total reward by providing supplemental income outside the experimental session; procedures construed as closed economies do not. In an open economy responding is assumed to be directly related to reward density, whereas in a closed economy responding is assumed to be inversely related to reward density. In contrast to this predicted correlation between response-reward relations and type of economy, behavior regulation theory predicts both direct and inverse relations in both open and closed economies. Specifically, responding should be a bitonic function of reward density regardless of the type of economy and is dependent only on the ratio of the schedule terms rather than on their absolute size. These predictions were tested by four experiments in which pigeons' key pecking produced food on fixed-ratio and variable-interval schedules over a range of reward magnitudes and under several open- and closed-economy procedures. The results better supported the behavior regulation view by showing a general bitonic function between key pecking and food density in all conditions. In most cases, the absolute size of the schedule requirement and the magnitude of reward had no effect; equal ratios of these terms produced approximately equal responding.     

Emotion Regulation and Middle School Adjustment in Japanese Girls: Mediation by Perceived Social Support

Prior research has stated that successful emotion regulation (ER) contributes to psychological health and favorable interpersonal relationships. However, few studies have explored adaptive ER strategies in a school setting. The present study targeted Japanese female adolescents and examined the relationship between two specific ER strategies (reappraisal and suppression) and school adjustment, with social support as a mediating variable. Two hundred and seventy Japanese middle school girls completed measures of ER, perceived social support, and subjective school adjustment. The results showed that school adjustment was highest among reappraisers, followed by a balanced group who used both strategies with equal frequency, then suppressors. In addition, reappraisal showed both direct and indirect effects on school adjustment, while suppression showed only a negative indirect effect on school adjustment. Our findings suggest that reappraisal is an effective strategy that promotes receiving social support and consequently enhances school adjustment. Suppression, on the other hand, has neither favorable nor harmful impacts on school adjustment, but may, in the long run, result in poorer adjustment by impairing social relationships among adolescent girls.     

Emotion regulation and psychopathological symptoms of Chinese school‐age children: A person‐centred and multi‐informant approach

Emotion regulation (ER) is a critical component of children's development. Many previous studies have utilised a single‐assessment method to reflect child ER, which might result in losing important information regarding the unique contribution of each informant. With a person‐centred approach and multi‐informant reports (mother, teacher and child), the current study examined 196 children's (age M = 9.21, SD = 1.10, range = 7–11 years; 51% girls) ER patterns and their associations with psychopathological symptoms in a Chinese sample. A model‐based clustering procedure resulted in 3 ER groups: the poor family ER group (n = 36), poor school ER group (n = 120), and overall good ER group (n = 40). Significant differences were found among ER clusters on teacher‐reported child psychopathological symptoms compared on the levels of withdrawn depression, somatic complain, thought problems and attention problems. No significant differences were found on the mother‐reported psychopathological symptoms. Compared with children in the poor school or poor family ER clusters, children in the overall good ER group demonstrated fewer psychopathological symptoms at school. Our results confirmed the advantage of adopting multi‐informant assessments to fully capture children's emotional profiles and linked these profiles with children's emotional and behavioural functioning at school.     

Cross‐cultural differences in emotion suppression in everyday interactions

Previous research suggests that in collectivistic cultures, people tend to suppress their emotions more than in individualistic cultures. Little research, however, has explored cross‐cultural differences in emotion regulation in everyday interactions. Using a daily social interaction method, we examined whether people from collectivistic backgrounds (Chinese exchange students and immigrants from the Moluccas, Indonesia) living in the Netherlands differed from those from individualistic backgrounds (Dutch natives) in emotion suppression during everyday interactions. We also examined whether this depended on their relationship with the interaction partner(s). We found that Chinese participants suppressed positive and negative emotions more than Dutch and Moluccan participants and that this was related to differences in interdependent and independent self‐construal across the samples. We also found that Chinese participants suppressed positive emotions less in interactions with close others, whereas Dutch participants suppressed negative emotions more with non‐close others. No such differences were found for Moluccans. Our findings support the idea that people from collectivistic cultures suppress emotions more than those from individualistic cultures, but they also suggest that this depends on who the interaction partner is. Furthermore, they suggest that emotion suppression may change when people with collectivistic backgrounds have been raised in individualistic cultures.