Abstract Efficient emotion regulation is central to everyday functioning, plays a key role in mental health, and is implicated in vulnerability to affective disorders. While many strategies can be used to regulate emotion, direct comparisons of their effects on subjective affect are often limited by differences in study design, stimulus material, and control conditions. To address these limitations, the present study compared four widely studied emotion regulation strategies—distraction, reappraisal, distancing, and suppression—within a single paradigm. The study focused on three central questions: (i) whether antecedent-focused strategies (distraction, reappraisal, distancing) are more effective than suppression in down-regulating negative affect; (ii) whether applying these strategies to neutral stimuli alters affective experience; and (iii) whether baseline emotional reactivity relates to variation in regulation success. Fifty-six healthy young adults viewed negative and neutral images either passively or while regulating their emotional responses and subsequently provided subjective valence and arousal ratings. All participants regulated negative images using each strategy; a subsample additionally applied the strategies to neutral images to quantify strategy effects independently of responses elicited by negative stimuli. All strategies reduced negative affect relative to passive viewing, and antecedent-focused strategies were more effective than suppression. Reappraisal produced the largest improvement in valence, whereas antecedent-focused strategies showed comparable reductions in arousal. Regulation also altered responses to neutral stimuli: reappraisal selectively increased reported valence, whereas distraction and distancing reduced arousal. Individual-difference analyses indicated that regulation success for antecedent-focused strategies did not vary with emotional reactivity, whereas higher reactivity on the valence dimension was associated with lower regulation success in suppression. Together, these findings support a process-model distinction between antecedent- and response-focused regulation and show that regulation strategies can shape affective experience even in the absence of negative emotional content.