Shift of Brain-State during Recovery from Discomfort Induced by Aversive Pictures

A dynamic causal model on self-regulation of aversive emotion

“…Under the unconscious state, people generally appear habitual emotion regulation. In our previous results, the existence of the habitual emotion regulation occur jointly with the emotion generation can be proved [ 31 ]. In this study, we selected only one part of the original data corresponding to the period of picture viewing for analysis, because the participants were more concentrated to respond to the aversive stimuli and deal with their emotions.…”

“…Twenty right-handed healthy postgraduate students (10 females) were recruited in the previous fMRI experiment, with the mean age of 25 ± 1.3 years and normal or corrected-to-normal vision [ 31 ]. Their data were re-used for the construction of dynamic causal models.…”

“…Nevertheless, complicated task commands can also make participants nervous, and distract them from the natural emotional baseline, although no explicit instruction is conveyed to ask them to notice or change their emotions. By contrast, Yang and colleagues investigated the emotional self-regulation during a natural recovery period following the discomfort induced by viewing aversive pictures (with fearful and disgusting contents) [ 31 ]. Only “viewing picture” and “taking a rest” (after viewing all pictures) were cued to the participants in the experiment.…”

“…To solve above problems, the dynamic causal modeling (DCM) was utilized in this study to unveil the effective connectivity in the brain network underpinning the implicit emotion regulation, which is an adequate approach to model how the directed neuronal connectivity generates the observed blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal during the emotional activity [ 39 ]. The fMRI data in Yang’s study on emotional self-recovery was reanalyzed to examine the architecture comprising four key brain regions with high repetition across the emotion regulation models [ 31 ]. Dynamic causal models were constructed to figure out how the relevant brain regions communicate to promote the natural shift of mental state in response to the aversive emotion; and which model best described the data.…”