In search of convergent regional brain abnormality in cognitive emotion regulation: a transdiagnostic neuroimaging meta-analysis

Abstract

Cognitive emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal) impairment is a key feature in a wide variety of mental disorders, suggesting common nature of disruption across psychiatric diagnoses. However, the extent of potential shared neurobiological disturbances related to reappraisalimpairment is incompletely understood. This study, therefore, aimed to identify neurobiological substrates of disturbed reappraisal using a transdiagnostic approach by performing a quantitative coordinate-based meta-analysis (CBMA) on reappraisal tasks across various mental disorders. Following the best-practice guidelines for neuroimaging meta-analysis, we systematicallysearched PubMed, ScienceDirect and Web of Science databases for whole-brain neuroimaging studies published through February 2020 that compared brain activation in patients with mental disorders and matched healthy controls during a reappraisal task. Out of 1608 publications, we retrieved 32 publications with 1240 unique individuals, providing sufficient power for conducting CBMA using activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method. The reported peak coordinates for the patient/control difference in selected articles were extracted and several ALE analyses were performed to identify spatial convergence. Surprisingly, neither the pooled ALE analysis noradditional analyses restricting to in-/decreased contrasts and more homogeneous grouping of coordinates (i.e., regulation direction, stimulus valence and disorder category) provided significant convergent findings. This CBMA indicates a lack of convergent regional abnormality related to reappraisal across various mental disorders. This might be due to the complex nature of reappraisal, heterogeneous clinical populations or methodological flexibility including preprocessing and analytical methods.

Emotion processing and regulation in major depressive disorder: A 7T resting-state fMRI study

“…Generally, our findings are consistent with this well-established notion that various forms of psychopathologies (e.g., MDD) involve dysfunctionality in some, but not necessarily all of regulatory steps (Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010;Gross et al, 2019;Khodadadifar et al, 2020).…”

Emotion processing and regulation in major depressive disorder: A 7T resting‐state fMRI study

“…Nonetheless, if patients are exposed to well‐justified instructions triggering the primary stages of regulation (i.e., evaluation and initiation), they will be subsequently able to implement the execution processes (Joormann & Stanton, 2016; Liu & Thompson, 2017). Generally, our findings are consistent with this well‐established notion that various forms of psychopathologies (e.g., MDD) involve dysfunctionality in some, but not necessarily all of regulatory steps (Aldao, Nolen‐Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010; Gross et al, 2019; Khodadadifar et al, 2020).…”