Figure 1.

(A) Schematic representation of the experiment. Following an automatized procedure where participants trained and selected how to generate emotional states, participants were asked to generate positive, negative and neutral states. Each trial started with a fixation cross (4–6 s.). Participants were then presented with cues indicating what emotional state to generate (green plus-sign = generate positive, red minus-sign = generate negative, blue zero = generate neutral) for 10 seconds. For the emotional conditions, the cue then either changed to a blue zero indicating that participants should down-regulate their generated states or remained the same as in the generation phase indicating that they should maintain the emotional state for another 5 seconds. Only this Maintain-condition was the topic of the current study. This was followed by a 5 second fixation cue, and a 5 second bipolar subjective affect rating. (B) Effect of generation instructions on subjectively reported affect. (C) Spearman correlations between modalities. (D) Modality usage reported by participants to generate emotions. (E) Reported combinations of modalities as a function of number of modalities participants reported using.