Vibing Out With the Task: A Qualitative Phenomenological Study of Emotion Engagement and Regulation Tasks

In recent years, qualitative phenomenological methods have emerged as a valuable instrument to investigate the cognitive processes inherent in and the ecological validity of various psychological tasks. This qualitative phenomenological study investigates the lived experience of emotion engagement and regulation during a combined cognitive-affective task, integrating emotional stimulus exposure with a working memory n-back task. Thirty healthy participants viewed standardized affective images and were instructed either to engage with their emotions or regulate them to maintain neutrality, while concurrently performing a cognitive task. Phenomenological interviews explored participants' moment-by-moment experiences, revealing that standardized static images generally lacked affective competence (they are not able to elicit spontaneous emotional responses), requiring participants to voluntarily construct emotional responses through empathy and sensemaking (a dynamic, narrative-driven process integrating perception, conceptual understanding, and embodied emotion). Emotional responses evolved temporally across multiple scales: anticipation, inklings, full emotional development, and either termination or persistence, which sometimes led to a buildup of spontaneous negative mood despite trial-by-trial voluntary construction of emotions. Traditional emotion regulation strategies appeared infrequently and were often idiosyncratic. Our findings suggest that emotional experience in laboratory-based tasks is predominantly voluntarily constructed. These observations necessitate future studies of the active, emulative components of emotion processing.