Background: Emotion regulation strategies such as distancing are a core component of many evidence-based, effective psychotherapeutic interventions. They allow individuals to exert more 'control' over their emotional state. However, objectively disentangling how emotion regulation increases control has been difficult for reasons including a lack of a coherent theoretical framework for emotion control and insufficient experimental control over external inputs. Here, we apply a well-established theoretical framework for controllability to a tightly controlled experimental setup to examine the computational mechanisms by which emotion regulation interventions enhance emotional controllability.
Methods: 109 participants were randomized to either a short emotion regulation intervention (distancing) or a control intervention. Both before and after the intervention, participants reported their emotional state along five dimensions repeatedly while watching a series of short, standardized, emotional video clips. A Kalman Filter was used to quantify how multidimensional emotional states changed with video inputs. The consequences of the emotion regulation intervention were examined by Bayesian model comparison, comparing models allowing for a change in intrinsic dynamics and/or input weights. Controllability was quantified using the controllability Gramian.
Results: The Kalman filter captured participants' emotional trajectories, showing that emotional states were affected by the emotional videos; persisted; and interacted with each other. The distancing strategy made emotional states less externally controllable. It did so by altering two aspects of the dynamical system: by stabilizing specific emotional patterns and by reducing the impact of the external video clips.
Conclusions: Our study used a novel approach to examine emotion regulation, finding that a brief distancing intervention increased perceived emotion control by reducing how much external stimuli can control emotional states. This is due to both an increase in the intrinsic stability of certain emotional states; and a reduction of the sensitivity to certain extrinsic affective stimuli.