Emotion regulation difficulties are differentially associated with late positive potential during the processing and regulation of social-affective stimuli.

Abstract

Emotion regulation difficulties are a transdiagnostic vulnerability linked to maladaptive emotional responding, yet their neural correlates during emotional processing and regulation remain incompletely understood. The present study examined whether individual differences in emotion regulation difficulties are associated with modulation of the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential sensitive to emotional salience and regulatory modulation. Seventy-nine adults (mean age = 26.25 years) completed an emotion regulation task involving five conditions: natural viewing of neutral, negative, and positive stimuli, and two active regulation strategies-cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression of negative social-affective stimuli-while EEG was recorded. Trait emotion regulation difficulties were assessed using the Chilean adaptation of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS-E). Trial-level linear mixed-effects models showed that Natural-Negative stimuli elicited larger LPP amplitudes than Natural-Neutral, Reappraisal-Negative, Suppression-Negative, and Natural-Positive trials, whereas Reappraisal-Negative, Suppression-Negative, and Natural-Positive did not differ significantly from Natural-Neutral. In a joint model including all five DERS-E dimensions, greater Lack of Emotional Control was uniquely associated with larger LPP amplitudes averaged across conditions, whereas greater Lack of Emotional Awareness was uniquely associated with smaller LPP amplitudes. Lack of Emotional Awareness was the only dimension showing a significant condition-dependent association, with a more negative LPP association during suppression than in each of the other four conditions. These findings support the LPP as an electrophysiological correlate of dimension-specific differences in emotion dysregulation during social-affective processing and regulation.