08-ECRP-028 The Social Dimension of Emotion Regulation: Brain, Mind and Behaviour
The main aims of this collaborative project were to investigate emotion regulation at different levels of analysis, ranging from individual differences to the social and cultural realm, and to work towards an integrative theoretical framework by bringing together leading European researchers in this field from social psychology, emotion psychology, and neuroscience. In Berlin, individual differences for different emotion regulation strategies were investigated by studying their neurogenetic basis. It was found that there is a common role for the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex irrespective of the type of emotion regulation strategy, whereas the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), a region known to be involved in social cognition, seems to have a special role for the strategy of distancing/detaching as well as for emotional stimuli with social content. Analyses of genetic influences are currently being performed. In Geneva, it was demonstrated that emotions and their regulation impact on interactive negotiations: in anonymous interactions people behave ego-centrically, a behaviour that is directly related to felt emotions. Furthermore, in order to serve this bias, people flexibly switch between the principles of equity (when performing well) and equality (when performing poorly). In contrast, in non-anonymous situations they accept unfairness to meet relationship goals and use emotion regulation to achieve this. In Cardiff, it was demonstrated that anticipating future emotional states considerably influences behaviour in social exchange games. Finally, it was found that experienced guilt is guiding behaviour in a social decision game specifically in people who do not habitually experience strong guilt feelings. Importantly, these studies are united by the finding that anticipated as well as experienced emotions and their regulation play a crucial role in decision-making and social interaction. This influence is modulated by individual differences in experiencing social emotions and in the use of different emotion regulation strategies, which are possibly influenced also by genetic factors. In order to investigate the role of social context for experienced emotion the participating labs in Berlin, Geneva and Cardiff have devised a common experiment combining behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses. We postulate that sharing emotions with others is an inherently social type of emotion regulation, with opposite effects depending on the valence of emotions shared (up-regulation of positive emotions, down-regulation of negative emotions), which should be observable on the different levels of analysis (behavioral and neural).
Furthermore, as the role of social factors in emotion regulation is increasingly recognized as critical and therefore deserves wider attention across disciplines, we are editing together a special issue in Frontiers of Emotion Science (an open-access journal) that brings together contributions of psychology, neuroscience and cultural psychology that have investigated the interaction of social factors with emotion regulation. We believe that this approach has far-reaching consequences because cognitive (neuro)science has until now investigated emotion regulation primarily in isolated and non-interacting individuals. Our project hopefully contributes to this more socially oriented view of emotion regulation without neglecting individual differences.
Project Leader
- HenrikWalterE-Mail
- University of BonnDepartment of PsychiatryDivision of Medical PsychologyBonnGermany
