Emotion regulation, attention to emotion, and the ventral attentional network

Abstract

Accounts of the effect of emotional information on behavioral response and current models of emotion regulation are based on two opposed but interacting processes: automatic bottom-up processes (triggered by emotionally arousing stimuli) and top-down control processes (mapped to prefrontal cortical areas). Data on the existence of a third attentional network operating without recourse to limited-capacity processes but influencing response raise the issue of how it is integrated in emotion regulation. We summarize here data from attention to emotion, voluntary emotion regulation, and on the origin of biases against negative content suggesting that the ventral network is modulated by exposure to emotional stimuli when the task does not constrain the handling of emotional content. In the parietal lobes, preferential activation of ventral areas associated with “bottom-up” attention by ventral network theorists is strongest in studies of cognitive reappraisal. In conditions when no explicit instruction is given to change one's response to emotional stimuli, control of emotionally arousing stimuli is observed without concomitant activation of the dorsal attentional network, replaced by a shift of activation toward ventral areas. In contrast, in studies where emotional stimuli are placed in the role of distracter, the observed deactivation of these ventral semantic association areas is consistent with the existence of proactive control on the role emotional representations are allowed to take in generating response. It is here argued that attentional orienting mechanisms located in the ventral network constitute an intermediate kind of process, with features only partially in common with effortful and automatic processes, which plays an important role in handling emotion by conveying the influence of semantic networks, with which the ventral network is co-localized. Current neuroimaging work in emotion regulation has neglected this system by focusing on a bottom-up/top-down dichotomy of attentional control.

Saccade-like behavior in the fast-phases of optokinetic nystagmus: An illustration of the emergence of volitional actions from automatic reflexes.

“…Reingold and Stampe (2004) have previously noted that between participant-variability in saccadic inhibition is very low; they showed that it did not matter whether one used individual or pooled data for analysing the dips in the latency distribution. As would be expected, the effect sizes in previous studies using saccadic inhibition have been very high (N = 64 reported effects, mean r = 0.82, SD = 0.11) (Buonocore & McIntosh, 2012, 2013Reingold & Stampe, 2000.…”

“…This dichotomy between 'automatic' and 'voluntary' processes remains embedded in many contemporary articles across a variety of disciplines: for example in spatial attention (Barbot, Landy, & Carrasco, 2012;Chica, Bartolomeo, & Lupiáñez, 2013;Ibos, Duhamel, & Ben Hamed, 2013;Macaluso & Doricchi, 2013;McAuliffe, Johnson, Weaver, Deller-Quinn, & Hansen, 2013;Mysore & Knudsen, 2013;D. T. Smith, Schenk, & Rorden, 2012); temporal attention (Lawrence & Klein, 2013); cognition (Lifshitz, Bonn, Fischer, Kashem, & Raz, 2013); motor cueing (Martín-Arévalo, Kingstone, & Lupiáñez, 2013); reading (Feng, 2012); perception (Pfister, Heinemann, Kiesel, Thomaschke, & Janczyk, 2012;Spence & Deroy, 2013); social cognition/perception (Laidlaw, Risko, & Kingstone, 2012) or emotion regulation (R. Viviani, 2013). Similarly, 'voluntary' and 'automatic' actions are clearly distinguished in clinical literature, for conditions ranging from deafness (Bottari, Valsecchi, & Pavani, 2012), to…”

The Relationship Between Regulation Disorders of Sensory Processing (RDSP) and White Matter Abnormalities

“…The second interesting fact is that in children with RDSP we analysed, we found a posterior-anterior gradient in the localization of the altered PVWM areas, in two cases with involvement of the deep WM of temporal and parietal areas, and this seems to be in accordance with the estimated dysfunction of the associative posterior and limbic areas, with an inevitable impact on the child's emotional sphere too [20].…”

Contrasting reactive and proactive control of emotional distraction.

“…The potential for emotional stimuli to attract or capture attention has been demonstrated in emotional Stroop (Phaf & Khan, 2007), dot-probe (Mogg, Bradley, De Bono, & Painter, 1997), visual search (Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001), and spatial cueing tasks (Fox, Russo, & Dutton, 2002); and their competitive advantage has been attributed to emotion-specific gain control mechanisms that are at least partly independent of classical bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms (Pourtois et al, 2013;Viviani, 2013). Indeed, some authors have argued that attention to emotional stimuli might be "impenetrable to cognitive control" (Öhman & Mineka, 2001, p. 483; see also Aue, Geux, Chauvigné & OkonSinger 2013;Aue, Chauvigné, Bristle, Okon-Singer, & Geux, 2016), meaning that top-down processes might fail to regulate responses to emotional distractors.…”