Imaging the up’s and down’s of emotion regulation in lifetime depression

Abstract

Reappraisal is a particularly effective strategy for influencing emotional experiences, specifically for reducing the impact of negative stimuli. Although depression has repeatedly been linked to dysfunctional behavioral and neural emotion regulation, prefrontal and amygdala engagement seems to vary with clinical characteristics and the specific regulation strategy used. Whereas previous neuroimaging research has focused on down-regulating reactions to emotionally evocative scenes, the current study compared up- and down-regulation in response to angry facial expressions in patients with depression and healthy individuals. During the initial viewing of faces, patients with depression showed hypoactivation particularly in areas implicated in emotion generation, i.e., amygdala, insula and putamen. In contrast, up-regulating negative emotions yielded stronger recruitment of core face processing areas and posterior medial frontal cortex in patients than in controls. However, group differences did not extend to resting-state functional connectivity. Recurrent depression was inversely associated with amygdala activation specifically during down-regulation, but differences in medication status may limit the current findings. Despite a pattern of reduced neural emotional reactivity in mainly medicated patients, their 'successful' recruitment of the regulation network for up-regulation might point toward an effective use of reappraisal when increasing negative emotions. Future studies need to address how patients might benefit from transferring this ability to adaptive goals, such as improving interpersonal emotion regulation.

Relationship of family functioning, satisfaction of basic psychological needs and depression considering the mediatory role of emotion regulation difficulty

“…In the present study, the path of the relationship between emotion regulation difficulty and depression is significant and positive; that is consistent with researches of Berkking et al (19), Folk et al (20), Joormann (21), Radke et al (22) and Schäfer et al (31). In fact, the results of this study showed that emotion regulation difficulty is known as an important factor for depression.…”

“…Students, who use inappropriate emotion regulation strategies, cannot afford to control their own living conditions in stressful situations and academic environments; therefore, they become depressed because of helplessness. Research of Berking, Wirtz, Svaldi and Hofmann (19), Folk, Zeman, Poon and Dallaire (20), Joormann and Vanderlind (21) and Radke et al (22) showed that the emotion regulation difficulty plays an important role in the starting and recurrence of depression disorder.…”

The regulation of positive and negative emotions through instructed causal attributions in lifetime depression – A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…Dysfunctional social behavior in depression ( Hirschfeld et al, 1999 ) calls for investigating and applying emotion regulation in interpersonal interactions ( Radke et al, 2018 ). Facial emotions are an important component of social communication, and therefore have a high ecologic validity and offer an ideal possibility to investigate emotion regulation in social situations.…”

“…Furthermore, participants were asked how difficult the task was and how much effort they put into the task. A similar design has been successfully implemented in a previous study ( Radke et al, 2018 ).…”

Distinct neural engagement during implicit and explicit regulation of negative stimuli

“…In particular, in highlighting the relevance of load theory in advancing our understanding of attentional control as it relates to psychological health, we and others have shown that individual differences in the anxiety spectrum (e.g., trait anxiety, social anxiety disorder) and traits that act as a vulnerability factor to anxiety and depression (e.g., behavioral inhibition; Muris, Merckelbach, Schmidt, Gadet, & Bogie, 2001) are frequently observed when perceptual load is low (Bishop et al, 2007; Bunford, Roberts, et al, 2017; Wheaton et al, 2014). It has also been demonstrated that anxious and depressed individuals exhibit aberrant neurofunctional activity during cognitive reappraisal to negative stimuli (Fitzgerald et al, 2017; Goldin, Manber, Hakimi, Canli, & Gross, 2009; Radke et al, 2017; Stephanou, Davey, Kerestes, Whittle, & Harrison, 2017). Furthermore, neural activity (i.e., ACC, amygdala) during reappraisal and to negative distractors under low (relative to high) perceptual load conditions predicts symptom change after cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in socially anxious patients (Klumpp, Fitzgerald, et al, 2017).…”