Neuronale Korrelate von Placeboeffekt, Furchtextinktion und willentlicher Emotionsregulation

BACKGROUND: It is important to control negative affect and perceived fear in normal life. Problems in emotion regulation lead to diseases like anxiety disorder. Different experimental domains like fear extinction, placebo and cognitive emotion regulation examine regulatory brain activation aiming to identify a domain-general controller of aversiveness and perceived fear. METHOD: A coordinate-based activation-likelihood estimation metaanalysis is used to identify concordant activations and associated deactivation in the three experimantal domains during diminishing negative affect. RESULTS: The analysis showed, indepenent of experimental domain, that the down-regulation of negative affect was associated with an activation in the vetromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), accompanied by a concordant reduction of activation in the amygdala; it was further accompanied by an activation in the anterior cingulate and the insular cortex in two of the experimantal domains like placebo and cognitive emotion regulation. CONCLUSION: The VMPFC may represent a domain-general controller of aversiveness that infuences parts of the emotion processing system like the amygdala. Further in higher-level regulation strategies, there are complementary brainregions, that play a important role during regualtion of negative affect.