Why are neurophysiological emotion regulation studies so hard to design?
Posted on Jun 25, 2010 by Tom Farrow
Has our casual exposure to powerful emotion-evoking scenes in everyday life led to arousal fatigue and subconscious, automatic emotion regulation? In an age of wall to wall television, YouTube and cinema, video scenes of intense suffering, graphic violence, fear-inducing horror and expertly-contrived elation are freely available and almost impossible to avoid. Indeed a whole film genre of ‘torture porn’ or ‘gorno’ (a portmanteau of ‘gore’ and ‘porn’) exists with a central aim of outdoing the last film in imagined depravity. Movie franchises such as Saw and Hostel are enormously lucrative and popular with adolescent / young adult audiences. When was the last time you watched the news on TV and felt genuinely sad, disgusted or angry? Objectively, the short video segments shown nightly are often appalling. Subjectively we suppress or cognitively reappraise our response, probably to prevent emotional overload.
These societal ‘norms’ of what is acceptable and the emotionally-charged environment in which we live are important for researchers such as us who design emotion-regulation tasks for subjects to perform in a brain scanner. By definition, to regulate an emotion, you need to experience an emotion first (or would experience one if you didn’t regulate). We have 10 seconds in which to show a video clip to frighten, sadden or disgust subjects sufficiently for them to be able to suppress (“I won’t let anyone watching know how I feel”) or cognitively reappraise (“It’s not real; it’s just a film”) their emotional response. Piloting of candidate videos throughout much of 2009 revealed just how difficult young undergraduate university students are to stir from their indifference to shocking videos. Dead kids from war-torn lands– see it all the time on the nightly news; deformity – didn’t you see ‘The boy with cancer for a face’ on Channel 5 last night?; vomit-splattered pavement – viewers’ reactions to the notorious ‘2 girls 1 cup’ video were one of the ten most popular YouTube downloads in 2009.
The old favourites of arachnophobia (spiders), ophidiophobia (snakes), haemophobia (blood) and trypanophobia (needles) are specific to individuals and aren’t really what we want to examine in our initial studies anyway. Oh for the (possibly apocryphal) Victorian gentleman shocked to discover on his wedding night that women have pubic hair or Victorian ladies swooning at the sight of an uncovered table leg. The possibilities for emotion-regulation studies with such subjects would be endless. Alas, today we deal with battle-hardened, emotionally armour-plated subjects well used to fending off a bombardment of arousing sights, sounds and ideas.
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