Individual differences in pupil dilation in response to emotional stimuli show excellent test–retest reliability 36, 45. That the pupil dilates in response to emotionally relevant stimuli has been corroborated by ample evidence 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44. Furthermore, we additionally test whether this measure captures features of an individual’s regulation ability that generalize to another self-control domain 30, namely dietary health challenges. Our findings present a physiological account based on pupil dilation that quantifies an individual’s engagement and success in emotion regulation. Moreover, we aimed to predict from individual pupil diameter during the regulation period to which degree participants managed to render their emotions more neutral. To dissociate these two aspects, we employed a combination of design features in the emotion regulation paradigm that allowed us to separate regulation-associated from emotional arousal components in the pupil diameter time course. One crucial problem for the interpretation of such physiological readouts in emotion regulation research is whether an increase in pupil dilation relates to emotional arousal induced by the stimulus content or to engagement in genuine cognitive control processes in service of regulation. Its millisecond temporal resolution allowed us to assess at which time point individuals engaged in emotion regulation. To this end, we combined an established emotion regulation paradigm 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 with pupillometry-a measure intricately linked to activity in the arousal system 27, 28, 29. We therefore aimed to simultaneously quantify the onset and efficacy of human emotion regulation. These questions are paramount for both basic and applied research, because inflexibility or inability to adaptively regulate emotions through strategies that favour beneficial behaviour in the long term is a hallmark of diseases such as depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and posttraumatic stress disorder for review see 13, and similar impairments of cognitive and emotion control have also been reported and recently been linked to pupil dilation in ADHD 14, 15, 16, 17 and autism 18. However, it is not trivial to measure whether individuals engage in regulating their emotions at any given moment, and most importantly, to predict how successful they will be. Novel frameworks conceptualize how emotion regulation operates on a moment-to-moment basis 11, 12 and across biological and psychological levels. Despite the abundance of psychological disorders involving maladaptive emotion regulation 9, validated quantitative tools to assess an individuals’ engagement in regulation in a clinical or research settings are surprisingly scarce and urgently needed 10. For example, individuals who engage more automatically in reappraisal when encountering negative experiences may mitigate stress-inducing effects 7 through this emotional buffer 8. Disturbances of emotion regulation are a hallmark of multiple psychiatric disorders 3, 4, 5 and emotion control has recently been identified as the component of self-control that is most predictive of mental health 6. Being able to experience different emotional states and if necessary, adaptively regulate emotional reactions, are core aspects of daily human lives 1, 2. Self-control skills enable individuals to align their behaviour with own long-term goals and values. These results suggest that a common arousal-based facilitation mechanism may support an individual’s self-control across domains. Participants who harnessed more regulation-associated arousal during emotion regulation were also more successful in choosing healthier foods. Moreover, the extent of this individual regulatory arousal boost predicted performance in another self-control task, dietary health challenges. Pupil diameter increase during regulation predicted individual differences in emotion regulation success beyond task difficulty. We employed an emotion regulation paradigm with a combination of design features that allowed us to dissociate regulation from emotional arousal in the pupil diameter time course of 34 healthy adults. Pupil diameter is a proxy to infer upon the central arousal state. However, the role of the arousal system in emotion regulation is less well understood. Multiple theories have proposed that increasing central arousal through the brain’s locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system may facilitate cognitive control and memory.
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