Effect of acceptance emotional regulation strategy on attention to emotional pictures

Abstract

To avoid the unwanted consequence in life and build up a psychological well-being, having the ability to regulate one’s emotional states is important (i.e., accepting one’s negative experience). This present study uses a within-subject design to examine the effects of acceptance, which is an emotion regulation strategy that allowing people to receive their emotions without control attempts such as judging or avoiding during a negative emotional situation to alter the emotional impact by comparing with suppression, which is another strategy involves inhibiting or suppressing emotional experience. This study also aims to investigate whether the acceptance strategy reduces the attentional capture toward the emotional stimuli through a dot-probe task. A sample of 32 adults from Hong Kong were recruited to complete the questionnaires measuring their emotional states and the perceived cognitive costs after watching the presented film clips. The also participated in the dot-probe task, which involves the presentation of sadness-inducing images to assess their reaction times when implementing acceptance and suppression. A greater level of self-reported negative effect on the emotional state was found in the acceptance condition, as compared with the suppression condition. However, the reaction times in the dot-probe task was found to be lower in the acceptance condition. Moreover, acceptance was perceived as less difficult and more successful to deploy than the suppression and there was no significant difference found in the perceived effort between two conditions. The findings of this study support acceptance as an effective emotional regulation strategy on the quick recovery of the negative emotions by having less attentional capture to the negative stimuli after a recovery period following the negative event.