Implicit and explicit fear of emotion and emotional situation selection among female college students

Some evidence indicates that a person’s attitude towards emotion (ATE; measured as liking/disliking of a discrete emotion) predicts the person’s situation selection (e.g., choice of emotional images), which is an essential part of emotion regulation. Would the association between ATE and stimulus selection be generalized to other types of ATE and stimuli? This study aimed to examine whether implicit and explicit fear of emotion (i.e., fear of experiencing an emotion due to concerns about losing control over the emotion) would predict the avoidance of emotion-inducing music. Seventy-three female university students, among whom approximately one third showed mild or above depressive symptoms, reported implicit and explicit fear of positive emotion and depression. Participants also completed the music choice task in which they were presented with a pair of emotional music excerpts and chose one they preferred to listen to. Results showed that those with greater implicit fear of positive emotion avoided the choice of high-arousal happiness-inducing music excerpts, particularly when the music was paired with high-arousal sadness and neutral-inducing excerpts. These results emphasise the need to consider both implicit and explicit processes, as well as arousal and valence, in understanding the role of fear of emotion in situation selection.