The Neural Bases of Emotion Regulation: Reappraisal and Suppression of Negative Emotion

Abstract

Background-Emotion regulation strategies are thought to differ in when and how they influence the emotion-generative process. However, no study to date has directly probed the neural bases of two contrasting (e.g., cognitive versus behavioral) emotion regulation strategies. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine cognitive reappraisal (a cognitive strategy thought to have its impact early in the emotion-generative process) and expressive-suppression (a behavioral strategy thought to have its impact later in the emotion-generative process).

Regulating the expectation of reward via cognitive strategies

“…This is consistent with recent neuroimaging studies suggesting that cognitive strategies modulate subcortical regions involved in aversive emotional processing [10][11][12] , further extending our results to the domain of emotional responses elicited by conditioned stimuli that predict potential rewards. Often, such reward expectations lead to impulsive decisions that are detrimental to an individual (for example, drug seeking behavior).…”

“…One promising method for examining this is the utilization of cognitive strategies commonly used in both social 9 and clinical 8 disciplines. Emotion regulation strategies, for example, have been successful in attenuating aversive emotional reactions that are elicited by various types of negative stimuli 10 , a pattern that is also reflected in neural regions involved in emotion, such as the amygdala, with both behavioral and subcortical neural modulations possibly mediated by prefrontal cortical regions 11,12 . Less is known, however, about the efficacy of such strategies with positive, anticipatory feelings that are elicited by a conditioned appetitive stimulus.…”

Disrupted Working Memory Circuitry in Schizophrenia: Disentangling fMRI Markers of Core Pathology vs Other Aspects of Impaired Performance

“…Regardless of performance, schizophrenia patients failed to deactivate bilateral vmPFC, a region assigned to the limbic network (Yeo et al, 2011). Patients also showed abnormally strong resting functional connectivity between vmPFC and lOFC, a region previously associated with emotion regulation processes and rumination (Eryilmaz et al, 2014;Goldin et al, 2008). Altered prefrontal connectivity in schizophrenia patients may underlie impaired filtering of irrelevant information (Anticevic et al, 2012), a phenomenon that may have contributed to the inverse correlation between vmPFC-lOFC connectivity and accuracy in our study.…”

Prefrontal Reactivity to Social Signals of Threat as a Predictor of Treatment Response in Anxious Youth

“…Precentral and postcentral gyri are involved in somatosensory processing and voluntary movement and have also been shown to activate during emotion regulation (Buhle et al, 2014;Goldin et al, 2008;Kohn et al, 2014). Though these regions have previously been related to treatment response in anxious adults (Klumpp et al, 2013;Phan et al, 2013), very …”