About us
The ACRLab (Affective Cognition & Regulation Laboratory) is headed by Prof.Yuan, Jiajin, PhD. The members include Chen, Weihai, PhD., Yang, Jiemin, PhD.,and a number of postgraduates full of scientific curiosity.  It is founded in September, 2013 based on the Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University. It is an important part of the Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality of the Ministry of Education in P.R.China.
Our central research interests are targeted at affective cognition and regulation using comprehensive techniques like peripheral physiological recording, EEG, TMS and fMRI,  with three main directions as follows:
　　The first research direction focuses on cognitive and neural underpinnings of the humans’ susceptibility to emotional stimuli and its individual differences. In particular, we are trying to understand how individual difference factors, like puberty, aging and personality, influence the humans’ susceptibility to positive and negative stimuli of diverse intensities.
　　The second direction focuses on emotion regulation, especially stress coping,the plasticity of emotion regulation styles, self efficacy of emotion regulation and their relationships with mental health.
　　The third direction examines cognitive underpinnings, physiological foundations, and the influence factors of social emotion and affective processes. We are interested in empathic ability and its developmental trajectories, as well as how contextual factors influence empathic process.Both human and animal models are used to explore these issues. Also, we study attitude similarity and its association with social affiliation and mental health.
    Unconscious Reappraisal works during frustration
    Instructed emotion regulation often fails as it is founded on painstaking efforts and heavy cognitive costs. In this regard, it is of vital importance to explore regulation strategies that work with little cognitive costs. A newly accepted work in our lab shows priming reappraisal goals unconsciously, despite few cognitive efforts, works well in reducing frustrating emotion and its related physiological activity.
    Source:  Yuan JJ., Ding NX, Liu YY & Yang JM. (2015): Unconscious emotion regulation: Nonconscious reappraisal decreases emotio...    [PDF]     Expressive suppression keeps negative emotions wel
    Our recent study shows that emotion- expressive suppression reduces emotional reactions for unpleasant scenes more quickly than reappraisal. This provides insights into people's real-life emotion regulation in urgent situations, where one often needs to dampen socially inappropriate emotion such as rage and impulse very quickly.
    Source:   Yuan J.J., Long Q.S., Ding N.X., Lou Y.X., Liu Y.Y.,& Yang J.M., (2014) expressive suppression dampens unpleasant emo...    [PDF]