Perceived emotion suppression and culture: Effects on psychological well‐being

Whether the negative effects of emotion suppression on psychological well‐being are applicable cross‐culturally is a long‐debated topic. The present study attempted to shed light on this debate, focusing on the effects of perceived emotion suppression and examining the psychological processes leading from perceived emotion suppression to lower psychological well‐being. We used a scale manipulation to lead 196 American and 213 Chinese participants to perceive themselves as having suppressed their emotions to a greater or lesser extent and then measured their life satisfaction. As expected, both the American and Chinese participants reported lower life satisfaction in the high‐suppression condition than in the low‐suppression condition; this negative effect was mediated by positive affect and moderated by self‐esteem. Specifically, perceived high emotion suppression decreased positive affect, which in turn led to lower well‐being. This effect was observed only for those with low self‐esteem, but the patterns and mechanisms were consistent cross‐culturally.     

A comparison of masking by visual and transcranial magnetic stimulation: implications for the study of conscious and unconscious visual processing

Visual stimuli as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can be used: (1) to suppress the visibility of a target and (2) to recover the visibility of a target that has been suppressed by another mask. Both types of stimulation thus provide useful methods for studying the microgenesis of object perception. We first review evidence of similarities between the processes by which a TMS mask and a visual mask can either suppress the visibility of targets or recover such suppressed visibility. However, we then also point out a significant difference that has important implications for the study of the time course of unconscious and conscious visual information processing and for theoretical accounts of the processes involved. We present evidence and arguments showing: (a) that visual masking techniques, by revealing more detailed aspects of target masking and target recovery, support a theoretical approach to visual masking and visual perception that must take into account activities in two separate neural channels or processing streams and, as a corollary, (b) that at the current stage of methodological sophistication visual masks, by acting in more highly specifiable ways on these pathways, provide information about the microgenesis of form perception not available with TMS masks.     

Acceleration and suppression of rats' responding to avoid foot shock and tail shock

Signalled response-independent shocks were superimposed on rats' wheel-turn responding to avoid shock administered to their feet through a grid floor or to their tails through fixed electrodes. In Experiment I, a tone paired with response-independent foot shock increased responding in three of four rats; a tone paired with tail shock increased responding in only one of four rats and suppressed responding in two rats. In Experiment II, a tone presented randomly with respect to response-independent shock had no reliable effect on responding to avoid foot shock or tail shock. In Experiment III, tail shock and foot shock were compared in a within-subject design while the temporal pattern of responding during conditioned stimuli was recorded. Responding during the conditioned stimulus preceding foot shock was characterized by initial suppression of responding at tone onset, followed by increased responding just before response-independent shock. Responding was suppressed throughout the conditioned stimulus preceding tail shock. Foot shock elicited bursts of responding, but tail shock did not.     

Suppression of ethanol-reinforced lever pressing by delaying food availability.

When food was initially available to rats under a fixed-interval 26-second schedule and each liquid-reinforced lever press delayed food availability 8 seconds, suppression of liquid-reinforced lever pressing and liquid consumption occurred when the liquid presented was 4, 8, 16, 32, and 0% ethanol. Suppression did not occur in yoked-control animals, which received food coincidentally with experimental animals but were not directly exposed to the delay dependency. After exposure to the food schedule, each ethanol solution served as a reinforcer in the absence of food presentation. Delaying food availability for increasingly long periods (8 to 2048 seconds) suppressed ethanol-reinforced lever pressing and consumption relative to baseline levels, with the maximum decrease being below the level maintained in the absence of food. However, degree of suppression did not increase monotonically with delay length. Liquid-reinforced performance of yoked-control animals indicated that suppression did not result from changes in the sequencing of food presentation alone.     

Response deprivation, reinforcement, and economics

Reinforcement of an instrumental response results not from a special kind of response consequence known as a reinforcer, but from a special kind of schedule known as a response-deprivation schedule. Under the requirements of a response-deprivation schedule, the baseline rate of the instrumental response permits less than the baseline rate of the contingent response. Because reinforcement occurs only if the schedule deprives the organism of the contingent response, reinforcement cannot result from any intrinsic property of the contingent response or any property relative to the instrumental response. Two typical effects of response-deprivation schedules—facilitation of the instrumental response and suppression of the contingent response—are discussed in terms of economic concepts and models of instrumental performance. It is suggested that response deprivation makes the contingent response function as an economic good, the instrumental response as currency.     

Initial excitatory conditioning with the truly random control procedure in rats: The effects of density of the conditioned stimulus

The present experiments were designed to test whether initial excitatory conditioning to a stimulus was obtained, using a within-subject design of the truly random control (TRC) procedure, and to examine the effects of the density of the conditioned stimulus on it. In Experiment 1, the effect of the three levels of CS density (50%, 25%, 20%) was assessed at six different stages of training, using the conditioned suppression of licking in rats. Although all of the groups given the TRC procedure showed evidence of initial excitatory conditioning, it was more marked in the group with the highest CS density than in the other groups. Experiment 2 confirmed the results of Experiment 1, using a between-subject design. The findings are in line with predictions from the Rescorla-Wagner model, and are discussed with reference to other contemporary theories of associative learning.     

Pathological personality facets and emotion (dys)regulation in gambling disorder

A number of researches showed high prevalence of personality disorders among addicted gamblers. However, there are still few studies investigating the role of pathological personality facets in Gambling Disorder (GD). Moreover, the nature of the relationship between GD and pathological personality is not clear. We administered to a group of addicted gamblers (N = 79) and a group of healthy participants (N = 101) a battery of self-report questionnaires encompassing the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS), The Personality Inventory for DSM-V (PID-5), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Analyses of variance showed that addicted gamblers, compared to healthy participants, scored higher on most of the subscales of the DERS, on the Suppression Dimension of the ERQ and on the five main domains of the PID-5 whereas they obtained lower scores on the Reappraisal subscale of the ERQ. Moreover, multiple regression analyses indicated that some specific facets of pathological personality, emotion dysregulation and lack of cognitive reappraisal, significantly predict GD's severity. Finally, emotion dysregulation levels and lack of cognitive reappraisal partially mediated the relationship between these and GD's severity. Our results confirmed the central roles played by both pathological personality and deficit in emotion regulation capacities in GD. Specifically, Impulsivity, Lack of Perseverance and Suspiciousness may be important predictors of GD severity. Moreover, emotion dysregulation and lack of adaptive emotion regulation strategies partially explained such relationship. As such, training for emotion regulation abilities appears strategically useful in the treatment of addicted gamblers with pathological personality traits.     

Conscious perception of flickering stimuli in binocular rivalry and continuous flash suppression is not affected by tACS-induced SSR modulation

The content of conscious perception is known to correlate with steady-state responses (SSRs), yet their causal relationship remains unclear. Can we manipulate conscious perception by directly interfering with SSRs through transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS)? Here, we directly addressed this question in three experiments involving binocular rivalry and continuous flash suppression (CFS). Specifically, while participants (N = 24) viewed either binocular rivalry or tried to detect stimuli masked by CFS, we applied sham or real tACS across parieto-occipital cortex at either the same or a different frequency and phase as an SSR eliciting flicker stimulus. We found that tACS did not differentially affect conscious perception in the forms of predominance, CFS detection accuracy, reaction time, or metacognitive sensitivity, confirmed by Bayesian statistics. We conclude that tACS application at frequencies of stimulus-induced SSRs does not have perceptual effects and that SSRs may be epiphenomenal to conscious perception.     

Retrieval inhibition of trauma-related words in women reporting repressed or recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse

Several authors have argued that survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) who report to have repressed their traumatic memories are more skilled in forgetting emotional stimuli than survivors who have always remembered the abuse. The current experiment employed a list-wise directed forgetting task to investigate whether women reporting repressed (n = 16) or recovered (n = 23) memories of CSA are better at forgetting disturbing material, relative to women reporting having always remembered their abuse (n = 55) or reporting no history of abuse (n = 20). We found no support for the hypothesis that women reporting repressed or recovered memories of CSA are especially versed in inhibiting retrieval of trauma-related words. Additional analyses revealed that participants characterized by a repressive coping style did not display a superior retrieval inhibition mechanism for negative material.