Emotion Down- and Up-Regulation Act on Spatially Distinct Brain Areas: Interoceptive Regions to Calm Down and Other Affective Regions to Amp Up

Abstract

Prior studies on emotion regulation identified a set of brain regions specialized for generating and controlling affect. Researchers generally agree that when up- and down-regulating emotion, control regions in the prefrontal cortex turn up or down activity in affect-generating areas. However, the assumption that turning up and down emotions produces opposite effects in the same affect-generating regions is untested. We call this assumption the 'affective dial hypothesis.' Our study tested this hypothesis by examining the overlap between the sets of regions activated during up-regulation and those deactivated during down-regulation in a large number of participants (N=105). We found that up- and down-regulation both recruit regulatory regions such as the inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus but act on distinct affect-generating regions. While up-regulation increases BOLD signal in regions associated with emotion such as the amygdala, anterior insula, striatum and anterior cingulate gyrus as well as in regions associated with sympathetic vascular activity such as periventricular white matter, down-regulation decreases signal in regions receiving interoceptive input such as the posterior insula and postcentral gyrus. These findings indicate that up- and down-regulation do not generally exert opposing effects on the same affect-generating regions. Instead, they target different brain circuits.

Heart rate variability and risk of agitation in Alzheimer’s disease: the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study

“…greater disease severity), which was mediated by increased (possibly compensatory) functional MRI activation in anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in autonomic and emotion regulation and interoception. 42 , 43 The observed differences in logHRV slopes between agitated and non-agitated individuals in our study may at least partly explain the inconsistent findings of HRV in Alzheimer’s disease from previous studies. 16 …”