Influence of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Spontaneous Neuro-Cortical Activities

The goal of this study is to test the hypothesis that the neuronal communication pathways, which enable neurocortical transmission, are mostly shaped by individual lifestyle as well as cognitive ability in managing positive/negative emotions. For this purpose, 64-channel spontaneous EEG data collected from participants, who frequently use some of the four defined emotion regulation strategies (rumination, distraction, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) and hardly ever use the, was downloaded from scientific international database called as LEMON. Since, nerve action potential lasts 2 sec throughout all phases, single-channel EEG recordings are analyzed into short segments of 2 s by using Principle Component Analysis (PCA). Then, the groups are compared to each other with respect to both local and regional PCA estimations in both eyes-closed and -opened states. The results show that both visual and auditory as well as attention required executive functions are influenced by rumination. PCA is found to be useful in discriminating emotion regulation capability in terms of spontaneous neuronal activities.