Emotion regulation (ER) is essential for mental health and daily functioning. Cognitive reappraisal is one of the most effective strategies for regulating emotion. Two distinct forms of reappraisal have been identified: Less Negative Reappraisal (LNR), which aims to reduce the intensity of negative emotions, and More Positive Reappraisal (MPR), which seeks to generate positive meaning from negative situations. Despite growing interest in individual differences in reappraisal effectiveness, few studies have integrated psychological traits and resting-state neural markers within a single paradigm to predict behavioral outcomes.
Forty-nine healthy young adults (mean age = 25.31 years) completed a cognitive reappraisal task involving LNR and MPR while viewing negative emotional pictures, with Electroencephalogram (EEG) being recorded. During this task, participants viewed each picture for six seconds and applied the instructed strategy. After each picture, they rated positive emotion, negative emotion, and arousal. Prior to the task, resting-state EEG was recorded with eyes open and eyes closed. Trait empathy was assessed using the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE).
Results indicated that both strategies reduced negative emotion and arousal and increased positive emotion compared to passive viewing. MPR produced significantly larger increases in positive emotion, while the effects on negative emotion and arousal were modulated by task order. Higher scores on emotion contagion, an affective empathy component, were consistently linked to greater regulation effectiveness across both strategies. Higher Theta/Beta Ratio (TBR) and Delta/Beta Ratio (DBR) in central and parietal regions were associated with smaller increases in positive emotion, especially during LNR. Greater occurrence of microstate class D, which reflects fronto-parietal network engagement, predicted better regulation effectiveness during LNR. However, when entered together into a regression model, only emotion contagion remained a significant independent predictor. The neural indices did not explain unique variance beyond trait empathy.
These findings show that MPR and LNR have distinct emotional effects and their relative effectiveness depends on the order of strategy use. Resting-state neural measures may reflect baseline regulatory capacity, but this capacity alone does not directly determine behavioral success. Instead, affective empathy plays a more direct and independent role in driving effective reappraisal. This study contributes to a growing literature on individual differences in ER. It shows that affective empathy traits and intrinsic neural dynamics each plays a role in shaping reappraisal success, and that combining both levels of analysis leads to a more complete understanding.
