Neural correlates of mindful emotion regulation in high and low ruminators

Abstract

Depressive rumination is considered a prominent risk factor for the occurrence, severity, and duration of depressive episodes. A variety of treatment options have been developed to treat depressive rumination of which mindfulness based programs are especially promising. In the current study, we investigated the neural underpinnings of a short mindfulness intervention and mindful emotion regulation in high and low trait ruminators in an ecologically valid environment using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Participants were randomly assigned to a mindfulness instruction (MT) group or an instructed thinking (IT) group. Participants in the MT group were trained to either focus their attention mindfully on their breath or their emotions, while the IT group focused their attention on the past or future. Afterwards, all participants underwent an emotion regulation paradigm in which they either watched negative or neutral movie clips. During both paradigms cortical hemodynamic changes were assessed by means of fNIRS. Participants in the MT group showed lower activity in the cognitive control network (CCN) during the focus on breath condition in comparison to the focus on emotion condition. Additionally, oxygenated hemoglobin in the MT group tended to be lower than in the IT group. Further, self-reports of emotional distress during the instruction paradigm were reduced in the MT group. During the emotion regulation paradigm, we observed reduced emotional reactivity in terms of emotional distress and avoidance in the MT group in comparison to the IT group. Furthermore, on a neural level, we observed higher CCN activity in the MT group in comparison to the IT group. We did not find any effect of rumination, neither on the intervention nor on the emotion regulation task. The results of this pilot study are discussed in light of the present literature on the neural correlates of mindfulness based interventions in rumination and emphasize the use of fNIRS to track neural changes in situ over the course of therapy.

Neural correlates of consciousness and related disorders: From phenotypic descriptors of behavioral and relative consciousness to cortico-subcortical circuitry

“…Gnosis refers to semantic recognition on the basis of the primary information received by the sensory and somesthetic cortices, and on internal sources of visceral origin, for example. The gnosis of thoughts should complete this description cogently, as the direct exploration of the neural correlates of thoughts has begun [9,10]. Praxis refers to goal-directed sequences of actions, acquired, overt, logically assembled, observable through spontaneous and provoked motor sequences.…”

“…Roughly, the dynamics of the cortical networks, notably anticorrelations, seems to be one of the most robust markers of consciousness [104,128]. One should bear in mind that these cortices also play a role in several processes or functions, up to emotion [10] and pure cognitive processes such as advanced mathematics [129]. Topological approaches of functional connectivity notably according to resting-state conditions could help to decipher the complexity of brain networks, such as graph theory [130][131][132], effective connectivity analysis [133], dynamics of function-structure similarities [128,134], and contextmodulated functional connectivity [135].…”

A dynamic causal model on self-regulation of aversive emotion

“…Considering the significance, plenty of studies have been yielded in the recent years, focusing on emotional responses or experiences with the help of fMRI [ 4 – 6 ]. More neuroimaging studies concentrated on the emotions with negative valence induced by aversive stimuli, such as fear and disgust, to uncover the neural correlates underlying various psychiatric diseases, such as the obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, and depressive disorders [ 7 – 11 ].…”

Application of Near-Infrared Spectroscopy for Evidence-Based Psychotherapy

“…This allows for detection of the neural mechanisms underlying the intervention through real-time monitoring during the intervention. This method is particularly suitable with NIRS and has been used in various forms of psychotherapy (Tables 1, 2), such as during mindfulness meditation (Gundel et al, 2018;Rosenbaum et al, 2020a), interpersonal brain synchronization between the counselor and client (Zhang et al, 2018(Zhang et al, , 2020, attention training with metacognitive therapy (Rosenbaum et al, 2018), exposure to stimuli for specific phobia (Landowska et al, 2018;Rosenbaum et al, 2020b), role lettering in writing therapy (Okamoto et al, 2010), and trauma-related recall with eye movement desensitization (Ohtani et al, 2009;Amano and Toichi, 2016). Nevertheless, this method restricts body movement during the intervention, which could disrupt performance, depending on the type of psychotherapy.…”