Emotion regulation is an indispensable part of mental health and adaptive behavior. Research into emotion regulation processes has largely focused on the concurrent effects of volitional emotion regulation. However, there is scarce evidence considering post-regulatory effects with regard to neural mechanisms and emotional experiences. Therefore, we compared concurrent effects of cognitive emotion regulation with effects at different (immediate, short- and long-term) time intervals. In an fMRI study with N = 46 (N = 30 at re-exposure) young healthy adults, we compared neuronal responses to negative and neutral pictures while participants had to distance themselves from or to actively permit emotions in response to these pictures. We investigated the temporal dynamics of activation changes related to regulation in cognitive control brain networks as well as in the amygdala during stimulation (concurrent effects, timepoint 1) and post-stimulation (immediate, timepoint 2), as well as during re-exposure with the same pictures after short (10 minutes, timepoint 3) and long (1 week, timepoint 4) time intervals. At timepoint 1, negative pictures (versus neutral pictures) elicited a strong response in regions of affective processing, including the amygdala. Distancing (as compared to permit) led to a decrease of this response, and to an increase of activation in the right middle frontal and inferior parietal cortex. We observed an interaction effect of time (stimulation vs. post-stimulation) and regulation (distance vs. permit), indicating a partial reversal of regulation effects during the post-stimulation phase (timepoint 2). Similarly, after 10 minutes (timepoint 3) and after 1 week (timepoint 4), activation in the amygdala was higher during pictures that participants were previously instructed to distance from as compared to permit. These results show that the temporal dynamics are highly variable both within experimental trials and across brain regions. This can even take the form of paradoxical aftereffects at immediate and persistent effects at prolonged time scales.
Individuals have a repertoire of emotion regulation (ER) strategies at their disposal, which they can use more or less flexibly. In ER flexibility research, strategies that facilitate goal achievement are considered adaptive and therefore are subjectively valuable. Individuals are motivated to reduce their emotional arousal effectively and to avoid cognitive effort. Perceived costs of ER strategies in the form of effort, however, are highly subjective. Subjective values (SVs) should therefore represent a trade-off between effectiveness and subjectively required cognitive effort. However, SVs of ER strategies have not been determined so far. We present a new paradigm for quantifying individual SVs of ER strategies by offering monetary values for ER strategies in an iterative process. N=120 participants first conducted an ER paradigm with the strategies distraction, distancing, and suppression.Afterwards, individual SVs were determined using the new CAD paradigm. SVs significantly predicted later choice for an ER strategy (χ²(4, n = 119) = 115.40, p < .001, BF10 = 1.62*10^21). Further, SVs were associated with Corrugator activity (t(5, 618.96) = 2.09, p = .037, f² < .001), subjective effort (t(5, 618.96) = -13.98, p < .001, f² = .035), and self-reported utility (t(5, 618.96) = 29.49, p< .001, f²= .155). SVs were further associated with self-control (t(97.97) = 2.04, p = .044, f² = .002), but not with flexible ER. With our paradigm, we were able to determine subjective values. The trait character of the values will be discussed.
It is an open question in cognitive emotion regulation research how emotion regulation unfolds over time, and whether the brain regions involved in down-regulation are also recruited during up-regulation of emotions. As a replication and extension of our preceding study, we conducted an fMRI study in N=47 young healthy adults on the neural basis of up- and down-regulation of negative and neutral pictures during the immediate stimulation phase as well as after short- and long-term delays. For this, we employed three experimental conditions – down-regulation (distance), maintenance (permit), and up-regulation (intensify) – for negative and neutral stimuli, and investigated the neural responses during the stimulation and post-stimulation phase as well as during re-exposure after 10 min and after 1 week. We observed the following main results: first, greater activation in emotion-generating regions such as the amygdala in the permit vs. distance and the intensify vs. distance comparisons, but not in the intensify vs. permit comparison. Second, greater activation in emotion-regulating regions such as the right inferior parietal and right superior / middle frontal cortex activation in the distance vs. permit and the distance vs. intensify contrasts, but not the permit vs. intensify contrast. Third, the activation difference between distance and intensify within the amygdala reversed after the regulation period. Fourth, previous emotion regulation did not influence the activation during re-exposure, neither after 10 minutes nor after 1 week. Taken together, the results provide a partial replication of persistent effects observed in our preceding study, indicate different neural systems for up- and down-regulation, and demonstrate that a broader perspective on emotion regulation can be achieved by simultaneously considering different goals, directions, and strategies of emotion regulation in a single experiment.
Emotion regulation is an indispensable part of mental health and adaptive behavior. Research into emotion regulation processes has largely focused on the concurrent effects of volitional emotion regulation. However, there is scarce evidence considering post-regulatory effects with regard to neural mechanisms and emotional experiences. Therefore, we compared concurrent effects of cognitive emotion regulation with effects at different (immediate, short- and long-term) time intervals. In an fMRI study with N=46 (N=30 at re-exposure) young healthy adults, we compared neuronal responses to negative and neutral pictures while participants had to distance themselves from or to actively permit emotions in response to these pictures. We investigated the temporal dynamics of activation changes related to regulation in cognitive control brain networks as well as in the amygdala during stimulation (concurrent effects, timepoint 1) and post-stimulation (immediate, timepoint 2), as well as during re-exposure with the same pictures after short (10 minutes, timepoint 3) and long (1 week, timepoint 4) time intervals. At timepoint 1, negative pictures (versus neutral pictures) elicited a strong response in regions of affective processing, including the amygdala. Distancing (as compared to permit) led to a decrease of this response, and to an increase of activation in the right middle frontal and inferior parietal cortex. We observed an interaction effect of time (stimulation vs. post-stimulation) and regulation (distance vs. permit), indicating a partial reversal of regulation effects during the post-stimulation phase (timepoint 2). Similarly, after 10 minutes (timepoint 3) and after 1 week (timepoint 4), activation in the amygdala was higher during pictures that participants were previously instructed to distance from as compared to permit. These results show that the temporal dynamics are highly variable both within experimental trials and across brain regions. This can even take the form of paradoxical aftereffects at immediate and persistent effects at prolonged time scales.
Inhibitory control represents a central component of executive functions and focuses on the ability to actively inhibit or delay a dominant response to achieve a goal. Although various tasks exist to measure inhibitory control, correlations between these tasks are rather small, partly because of the task impurity problem. To alleviate this problem, a latent variable approach has been previously applied and two closely related yet separable functions have been identified: prepotent response inhibition and resistance to distractor interference. The goal of our study was a) to replicate the proposed structure of inhibitory control and b) to extend previous literature by additionally accounting for speed-accuracy trade-offs, thereby potentially increasing explained variance in the investigated latent factors. To this end, 190 participants completed six inhibitory control tasks (antisaccade task, Stroop task, stop-signal task, flanker task, shape-matching task, word-naming task). Analyses were conducted using standard scores as well as inverse efficiency scores (combining response times and error rates). In line with previous studies, we generally found low zero-order correlations between the six tasks. By applying confirmatory factor analysis using standard reaction time difference scores, we were not able to replicate a satisfactory model with good fit to the data. By using inverse efficiency scores, a two-related-factor and a one-factor model emerged that resembled previous literature, but only four out of six tasks demonstrated significant factor loadings. Our results highlight the difficulty in finding robust inter-correlations between commonly used inhibitory control tasks, even when applying a latent variable analysis and accounting for speed-accuracy trade-offs.
Neuroimaging functional connectivity analyses have shown that the negative coupling between amygdala and cortical regions is linked to better emotion regulation (ER) in experimental task settings. However, less is known about the neural correlates of ER traits or dispositions. The present study aimed to (1) replicate the findings of differential cortico-limbic coupling during resting state depending on the dispositional use of emotion regulation strategies. Furthermore, the study aimed to (2) extend prior findings by examining whether differences in cortico-limbic coupling during resting state predict experiential and neuronal ER success in a standard ER task. To this end, N=107 healthy adults completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), underwent an 8-min resting-state fMRI acquisition and completed a reappraisal task during fMRI. Functional connectivity maps of basolateral and centromedial amygdala nuclei were estimated with a seed-based approach regarding associations with regions of the prefrontal cortex, and were then correlated with ERQ scores as well as experiential and neuronal ER success. All hypotheses and the analysis plan are preregistered at https://osf.io/8wsgu. Opposed to prior findings, we were not able to replicate a correlation of dispositional ER strategy use with functional connectivity between amygdala and PFC regions (p > 0.05, FWE-corrected). Furthermore, there was no association of experiential and neuronal reappraisal success with functional connectivity between amygdala and insula as well as PFC (p > 0.05, FWE-corrected). The present preregistered study calls into question the reported association between individual differences in resting state cortico-limbic connectivity and dispositional use of ER strategies. However, ongoing advances in functional brain imaging and distributed network approaches may leverage the identification of reliable functional connectivity patterns that underlie successful emotion regulation.
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