Individuals frequently generate emotion during the anticipation process and the anticipatory emotion has an important adaptive significance, especially the negative anticipative emotion. Many researches used conscious emotion regulation strategy and successfully reduced negative anticipatory emotion. However, it is costly for our limited cognition. In the present study, we used sentence unscrambling tasks to prime unconscious emotion control goal and investigated its effect on anticipatory anxiety, including experience and physiological activity. The results showed that 1) relative to anticipating neutral images, participations’ anxiety experience and skin conductance level were higher when anticipating negative and unknown images; 2) participants who had a unconscious emotion control goal primed achieved the same decrease in skin conductance as those explicitly instructed to reappraise, compared to a control group; 3) heart rate was not affected by experiment condition and anticipation type. Together, these findings suggest that unconscious emotion regulation may provide an effective mean of regulating negative anticipatory emotion.
KeywordsAnticipatory AnxietyPhysiological ActivityUnconscious Emotional Control Goals Priming
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