Recent studies have focused on investigating factors that moderate the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether the use of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies moderate the association between cognitive emotion regulation strategies and depression/anxiety. 1,000 participants aged 20 to 69 years, completed self-report measures regarding their daily use of interpersonal and cognitive emotion regulation strategies and depression/anxiety. Results indicated that four of the interpersonal emotion regulation strategies moderate the associations between seven cognitive emotion regulation strategies and depression/anxiety. These findings suggest that the relationship between a particular cognitive emotion regulation strategy and psychological health may depend on individuals’ use of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. Future studies should examine whether the findings obtained in the present study are replicable.

The purpose of this study was to unveil temporal relationship of physiological states during emotional experience. It has been widely accepted that emotion arises from interaction between cerebral processing and bodily response (i.e., autonomic nervous system: ANS). Therefore, we measured indices of both types of activities, using frontal alpha asymmetry (Davidson, Ekman, Saron, Senulis, & Friesen, 1990) for cerebral processing, and heart rate (HR) for ANS. Twenty-two participants watched six video clips for emotion induction (two each for negative, neutral, and positive emotions), during which electroencephalograms (EEGs) and electrocardiograms (ECGs) were recorded. Cross-correlation analyses revealed that the fluctuation of frontal alpha asymmetry synchronized with that of HR only when participants watched positive video clips. Because most participants changed their facial expression during the clips, it is possible that facial expression was induced by the synchronization of frontal alpha asymmetry and ANS activity. In addition, when they watched one of the positive clips, frontal alpha asymmetry fluctuation was preceded by HR variation. This indicated that ANS response might influence activity of cerebral area where frontal alpha asymmetry arises.

We examined the extent to which a beneficiary experiences gratitude toward a benefit, as a function of what another beneficiary has received. In our experiment, participants who are university students read a scenario in which the protagonist received help from his or her classmate for a report. Imagining themselves as the protagonist, participants rated the extent to which they felt grateful. We manipulated what a protagonist’s friend underwent (i.e., receiving better help, receiving worse help, or being refused help). In the control condition, no mention of the protagonist’s friend was made. Overall, there was no significant difference between the gratitude experienced in various conditions. However, a comparison of the gratitude scores of participants in the lower half of each condition revealed that, the participants who read that the friend was refused help felt more grateful than those in the control condition. This suggests that knowing another person fails to receive helps increases gratitude among those who otherwise feel less gratitude.