The neural bases of cognitive emotion regulation: The roles of strategy and intensity

Abstract

When confronted with unwanted negative emotions, individuals use a variety of cognitive strategies for regulating these emotions. The brain mechanisms underlying these emotion regulation strategies have not been fully characterized, and it is not yet clear whether these mechanisms vary as a function of emotion intensity. To address these issues, 30 community participants (17 females, 13 males, M age = 24.3 years) completed a picture-viewing emotion regulation task with neutral viewing, reacting to negative stimuli, cognitive reappraisal, attentional deployment, and self-distancing conditions. Brain and behavioral data were simultaneously collected in a 3T GE MRI scanner. Findings indicated that prefrontal regions were engaged by all three regulation strategies, but reappraisal showed the least amount of increase in activity as a function of intensity. Overall, these results suggest that there are both brain and behavioral effects of intensity and that intensity is useful for probing strategy-specific effects and the relationships between the strategies. Furthermore, while these three strategies showed significant overlap, there also were specific strategy-intensity interactions, such as frontoparietal control regions being preferentially activated by reappraisal and self-distancing. Conversely, self-referential and attentional regions were preferentially recruited by self-distancing and distraction as intensity increased. Overall, these findings are consistent with the notion that there is a continuum of cognitive emotion regulation along which all three of these strategies lie.

The VLPFC versus the DLPFC in Downregulating Social Pain Using Reappraisal and Distraction Strategies

“…This result is in line with the cognitive model of emotional regulation (Gross 1998), which states that these two regulation strategies function separately during the early and late stages of peoples' cognitive control of their emotions. Additionally, this finding is consistent with previous fMRI observations, demonstrating that distraction and reappraisal, specifically and separately, recruit the DLPFC and the VLPFC, respectively (Dörfel et al 2014;Moodie et al 2020). The contribution of this study is two-fold.…”

“…While the key brain regions for emotional regulation are primarily located in the prefrontal cortex (Ochsner et al 2012), some studies have demonstrated that explicit emotional regulation using varying strategies do not involve the exact overlapping neural substrates (Morawetz et al 2017;Vrtička et al 2011). In particular, although the dorsolateral (DLPFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices (VLPFC) are both important in distraction and reappraisal (Buhle et al 2014;Kohn et al 2014), e.g., the two regions often activate together during reappraisal (Morawetz et al 2017;Ochsner et al 2012), neuroimaging studies have revealed that while the VLPFC is consistently involved during reappraisal, the DLPFC is more associated with distraction (Dörfel et al 2014;Moodie et al 2020). However, it remains unclear to what extent these two brain regions are essential and specific for both of these strategies.…”

Emotion Down- and Up-Regulation Act on Spatially Distinct Brain Areas: Interoceptive Regions to Calm Down and Other Affective Regions to Amp Up

“…We observed broad activation in the white matter surrounding the ventricles during intensifying emotion compared to viewing emotional images (Figure 4B). Although we could not find prior studies which explicitly discussed white matter activation during emotion regulation, we observed it in the figures of studies reporting on emotion up-regulation and the viewing of highly emotional images (e.g., Grosse Rueschkamp et al, 2019, Figure 4; Moodie et al, 2020, Figure 3). Increased white matter BOLD signal associated with increased emotional arousal might be due to sympathetic activity increasing vascular tone (Özbay et al, 2018).…”

Anxiety, not regulation tendency, predicts how individuals regulate in the laboratory: An exploratory comparison of self-report and psychophysiology

“…This sample size was idealized for a different empirical question (see [47]) and results should be interpreted cautiously. However, our sample size in line with or larger than numerous studies that use the same emotional stimuli and similarly investigate the effects of regulation strategies [3,48].…”