Emotion regulation is crucial for one's adaptation to their environment. Reappraising emotionally salient stimuli is one of successful strategies of controlling emotional response, however, it requires free cognitive resources. There are different ways to obtain information about one's emotional processing such as subjective self-reported values as well as more objective measures like electroencephalography. Late positive potential is an event related potential that is enhanced when viewing emotional stimuli with maximal amplitude at superiror-posterior part of the scalp. The aim of our study was to investigate the effect of burdening cognitive control on success of emotion regulation with cognitive reappraisal. 36 participants were performing n-back and reported values of valence and arousal to different pictorial stimuli they were exposed to during performance on the n-back task. In six experimental conditions we manipulated cognitive load (1-back, 2-back), emotional salience of stimuli (negative, neutral stimuli) and form of emotion regulation (no emotion regulation, cognitive reappraisal). We also recorded EEG signal during task performance. The results suggest that performance on n-back task and emotion regulation with cognitive reappraisal compete for available cognitive sources and that higher cognitive load diminishes the ability to regulate emotions with cognitive reappraisal.
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