Abstract
Emotion regulation has been proposed as a form of emotional processing in which an individual influences the occurrence, experience, and expression of emotions. Research has found that exercise has the potential for improvement in emotion regulation. Furthermore, other forms of emotional processing might be altered by exercise. My Ph.D. research focuses on exercise-related changes in emotional processing, as evidence supporting exercise-enhanced emotion regulation.
To begin with, this thesis reviewed the studies related to the processing of emotional information and exercise and proposed that exercise might influence cognitive processes during emotional information processing. These cognitive processes (psychological pathways) are related to emotional generation and regulation, thereby indirectly influencing the process of emotion regulation. Based on the proposed theoretical framework that interprets how exercise indirectly affects certain potential cognitive processes (psychological variables), the overarching goal of the thesis is to use the Electroencephalography techniques to investigate the effects of exercise on cognitive emotion regulation and explore how exercise modulates emotional information processing in the brain, thereby enhancing emotion regulation.
Study 1 (Chapter 3) aimed to examine whether a single bout of exercise can have beneficial influences on cognitive emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal) in the context of the prefrontal asymmetry hypothesis. Study 2 (Chapter 4) and Study 3 (Chapter 5) respectively explored how acute exercise modulates the neural dynamics of the resolution of negative emotional conflicts and of the memory retrieval regarding negative emotional information.
Generally, the results suggested that exercise could benefit emotion regulation. First, exercise could mitigate the impact of negative stimuli on the early stages of the process of cognitive control, reflective of the reduced attentional over-allocation captured by negative content. Then, exercise could reduce the adverse impact caused by the involuntary retrieval of negative emotional memories by interfering with the memory reconsolidation process. Considering the important roles of attention and memory in emotional generation and regulation, the present findings support exercise-related mechanisms (pathways) of attention and memory, underlying that exercise could facilitate emotion regulation.