Ratings and eye movements of emotion regulation

People have different strategies to regulate and control their own emotions. For short-term emotion regulation of visual stimuli, cognitive reappraisal and attentional deployment are of relevance. The present study used self-ratings and eye-tracking data to replicate previous findings that eye movements are effective in emotion regulation. 25 participants (6 males) watched positive and negative pictures in an attend condition and a decrease emotion condition. They rated their emotional experience and their eye movements were followed with an eye-tracker. Ratings showed that they perceived pictures as less emotional in the decrease condition as compared to the attend condition both for positive and negative pictures. This decrease in ratings of emotional response was larger for positive than for negative pictures. Eye-tracking data showed no significant effect of emotion regulation condition. Further research is proposed to include self-ratings in studies of physiological changes due to emotion regulation, to differentiate between strategies of emotion regulation potentially used by participants