Distraction and Expressive Suppression Strategies in Regulation of High- and Low-Intensity Negative Emotions

The current study compared the effectiveness of distraction, an antecedent-focused strategy that involves diverting an individual’s attention away from affective terms, and expressive suppression, a response-focused strategy that involves inhibiting conscious emotion-expressive behavior during an emotionally aroused state, in the regulation of high- and low-intensity unpleasant stimuli, using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixteen participants completed an emotion regulation experiment in which they passively viewed high- or low-intensity unpleasant images (view), solved a mathematical equation presented on high- or low-intensity negative images (distraction), or suppressed their emotional expression in response to high- or low-intensity unpleasant images (suppression). Their negative experiences after implementation of these strategies were rated by participants on a 1–9 scale. We mainly found that compared with expressive suppression, distraction yielded greater attenuation of the early phase of centro-parietal LPP when the participants responded to high-intensity stimuli. In the low-intensity condition, distraction, but not expressive suppression, effectively decreased the early phase of LPP. The findings suggest that expressive suppression works as early as distraction in the high-intensity condition; more importantly, distraction is superior to expressive suppression in regulating negative emotion, which is influenced by emotional intensity.