Implicit induction of expressive suppression in regulation of happy crowd emotions

ABSTRACT

Implicit emotion regulation provides an effective means of controlling emotions triggered by a single face without conscious awareness and effort. Crowd emotion has been proposed to be perceived as more intense than it actually is, but it is still unclear how to regulate it implicitly. In this study, participants viewed sets of faces of varying emotionality (e.g. happy to angry) and estimated the mean emotion of each set after being primed with an expressive suppression goal, a cognitive reappraisal goal, or a neutral goal. Faster discrimination for happy than angry crowds was observed. After induction of the expressive suppression goal instead of the cognitive reappraisal goal, augmented N170 and early posterior negativity (EPN) amplitudes, as well as attenuated late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes, were observed in response to happy crowds compared to the neutral goal. Differential processing of angry crowds was not observed after the induction of both regulatory goals compared to the neutral goal. Our findings thus reveal the happy-superiority effect and that implicit induction of expressive suppression improves happy crowd emotion recognition, promotes selective coding, and successfully downregulates the neural response to happy crowds.

KEYWORDS:

• Implicit goal pursuit
• crowd emotions
• expressive suppression
• cognitive reappraisal
• event-related potential (ERP)

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge all students for their participation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2024.2340806

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31871106, 31970991]; the Fundamental Research Program of Liaoning Provincial Department of Education [JYTQN2023234]; and the PhD Research Startup Foundation of Liaoning Police College [2022LNPCBS-103].