Bottom-Up and Cognitive Top-Down Emotion Regulation: Experiential Emotion Regulation and Cognitive Reappraisal on Stress Relief and Follow-Up Sleep Physiology

Yulin Wang, Elke Vlemincx, Iris Vantieghem, Monica Dhar, Debo Dong and Marie Vandekerckhove
Additional contact information
Yulin Wang: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Elke Vlemincx: Department of Health Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Iris Vantieghem: Faculty of Medicine and Psychopharmacology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Monica Dhar: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Debo Dong: Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
Marie Vandekerckhove: Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 13, 1-19

Abstract: Emotional stress throughout the day is known to affect objective sleep physiology and subjective sleep quality. In the interplay between emotions and sleep, emotion regulation plays a critical role in the recovery from stressful, emotional events and subsequent sleep. While the effects of top-down emotion regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal on sleep have been studied before, the impact of bottom-up emotion regulation strategies such as experiential emotion regulation is understudied. Cognitive reappraisal reflects the cognitive reinterpretation of the meaning of a stressful event, while experiential emotion regulation involves an active, non-intervening, accepting, open and welcoming approach of acknowledging awareness of raw sensory affective experiences or ‘experiential awareness’ in a first phase and expression in a second phase. The present study aims to investigate the effects of experiential emotion regulation and cognitive reappraisal on the recovery from pre-sleep emotional stress measured by (1) negative affect and (2) sleep structure. Sleep of forty-three healthy Dutch-speaking participants (22 females, 21 males) has been assessed using EEG polysomnography. Stress was triggered using a pre-sleep emotional failure induction, after which emotion regulation by experiential emotion regulation versus cognitive reappraisal versus control was induced twice. The control condition consisted of the reallocation of attention towards the neutral aspects of the emotional event. The results indicated that recovery from negative affect of the failure experience after single or repeated deployment of experiential emotion regulation and cognitive reappraisal was not significantly different from the control condition. Moreover, after repeated deployment, sleep physiology did not significantly differ between experiential emotion regulation, cognitive reappraisal, and the control condition in the impact of the regulation of the failure experience. The implications of the distinctive impact of experiential emotion regulation and cognitive reappraisal on both the pre-sleep emotional experience and follow-up sleep physiology are discussed.

Keywords: experiential; reinterpret; stress; negative affect; rapid eye-movement sleep (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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