The regulation of positive and negative social feedback: a psychophysiological study

Everyday social evaluations are psychologically potent and trigger self-reflective thoughts and feelings. The present study sought to examine the psychophysiological impact of such evaluations using eye tracking, pupillometry, and heart-rate variability. Fifty-nine healthy adult volunteers received rigged social feedback (criticism and praise) based on their photograph. Gaze data were collected to investigate processes of attentional deployment/allocation toward the self or the evaluator expressing criticism or praise. Whereas voluntary attention was directed to evaluators who expressed praise, attention was drawn to one's own picture after criticism. Pupil dilation and heart-rate variability were larger in response to criticism as compared to praise, suggesting a flexible and adaptive emotion regulatory effort in response to social information that triggers an affective response. Altogether, healthy individuals recruited more regulatory resources to cope with negative (as compared to positive) social feedback, and this processing of social feedback was associated with adjustments in self-focused attention

Amygdalar function reflects common individual differences in emotion and pain regulation success

Although the co-occurrence of negative affect and pain is well recognized, the mechanism underlying their association is unclear. To examine whether a common self-regulatory ability impacts the experience of both emotion and pain, we integrated neuroimaging, behavioral, and physiological measures obtained from three assessments separated by substantial temporal intervals. Out results demonstrated that individual differences in emotion regulation ability, as indexed by an objective measure of emotional state, corrugator electromyography, predicted self-reported success while regulating pain. In both emotion and pain paradigms, the amygdala reflected regulatory success. Notably, we found that greater emotion regulation success was associated with greater change of amygdalar activity following pain regulation. Furthermore, individual differences in degree of amygdalar change following emotion regulation were a strong predictor of pain regulation success, as well as of the degree of amygdalar engagement following pain regulation. These findings suggest that common individual differences in emotion and pain regulatory success are reflected in a neural structure known to contribute to appraisal processes

Mind the social feedback : effects of tDCS applied to the left DLPFC on psychophysiological responses during the anticipation and reception of social evaluations

The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) is implicated in anticipatory (i.e. during anticipation of emotional stimuli) and online (i.e. during confrontation with emotional stimuli) emotion regulatory processes. However, research that investigates the causal role of the lDLPFC in these processes is lacking. In this study, 74 participants received active or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the lDLPFC. Participants were told strangers evaluated them. These (rigged) social evaluations were presented, and in 50% of the trials, participants could anticipate the valence (positive or negative) of the upcoming social feedback. Pupil dilation (a marker of cognitive resource allocation) and skin conductance responses (a marker of arousal) were measured. The results indicate that active (compared to sham) tDCS reduced arousal during the confrontation with anticipated feedback but only marginally during the confrontation with unanticipated feedback. When participants were given the opportunity to anticipate the social feedback, tDCS reduced arousal, irrespective of whether one was anticipating or being confronted with the anticipated feedback. Moreover, tDCS reduced cognitive resource allocation during anticipation, which was associated with resource allocation increases during the subsequent confrontation. Altogether, results suggest that the lDLPFC is causally implicated in the interplay between anticipatory and online emotion regulatory processes

Attention training through gaze-contingent feedback: effects on reappraisal and negative emotions

Reappraisal is central to emotion regulation but its mechanisms are unclear. This study tested the theoretical prediction that emotional attention bias is linked to reappraisal of negative emotion-eliciting stimuli and subsequent emotional responding using a novel attentional control training. Thirty-six undergraduates were randomly assigned to either the control or the attention training condition and were provided with different task instructions while they performed an interpretation task. Whereas control participants freely created interpretations, participants in the training condition were instructed to allocate attention toward positive words to efficiently create positive interpretations (i.e., recruiting attentional control) while they were provided with gaze-contingent feedback on their viewing behavior. Transfer to attention bias and reappraisal success was evaluated using a dot-probe task and an emotion regulation task which were administered before and after the training. The training condition was effective at increasing attentional control and resulted in beneficial effects on the transfer tasks. Analyses supported a serial indirect effect with larger attentional control acquisition in the training condition leading to negative attention bias reduction, in turn predicting greater reappraisal success which reduced negative emotions. Our results indicate that attentional mechanisms influence the use of reappraisal strategies and its impact on negative emotions. The novel attention training highlights the importance of tailored feedback to train attentional control. The findings provide an important step toward personalized delivery of attention training

Failure to regulate: counterproductive recruitment of top-down prefrontal-subcortical circuitry in major depression

Although depressed mood is a normal occurrence in response to adversity in all individuals, what distinguishes those who are vulnerable to major depressive disorder (MDD) is their inability to effectively regulate negative mood when it arises. Investigating the neural underpinnings of adaptive emotion regulation and the extent to which such processes are compromised in MDD may be helpful in understanding the pathophysiology of depression. We report results from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study demonstrating left-lateralized activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when downregulating negative affect in nondepressed individuals, whereas depressed individuals showed bilateral PFC activation. Furthermore, during an effortful affective reappraisal task, nondepressed individuals showed an inverse relationship between activation in left ventrolateral PFC and the amygdala that is mediated by the ventromedial PFC (VMPFC). No such relationship was found for depressed individuals, who instead show a positive association between VMPFC and amygdala. Pupil dilation data suggest that those depressed patients who expend more effort to reappraise negative stimuli are characterized by accentuated activation in the amygdala, insula, and thalamus, whereas nondepressed individuals exhibit the opposite pattern. These findings indicate that a key feature underlying the pathophysiology of major depression is the counterproductive engagement of right prefrontal cortex and the lack of engagement of left lateral-ventromedial prefrontal circuitry important for the downregulation of amygdala responses to negative stimuli

Age differences in brain activity during emotion processing: reflections of age-Related decline or increased emotion regulation?

Despite the fact that physical health and cognitive abilities decline with aging, the ability to regulate emotion remains stable and in some aspects improves across the adult life span. Older adults also show a positivity effect in their attention and memory, with diminished processing of negative stimuli relative to positive stimuli compared with younger adults. The current paper reviews functional magnetic resonance imaging studies investigating age-related differences in emotional processing and discusses how this evidence relates to two opposing theoretical accounts of older adults’ positivity effect. The aging-brain model [Cacioppo et al. in: Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind. New York, Oxford University Press, 2011] proposes that older adults’ positivity effect is a consequence of age-related decline in the amygdala, whereas the cognitive control hypothesis [Kryla-Lighthall and Mather in: Handbook of Theories of Aging, ed 2. New York, Springer, 2009; Mather and Carstensen: Trends Cogn Sci 2005;9:496–502; Mather and Knight: Psychol Aging 2005;20:554–570] argues that the positivity effect is a result of older adults’ greater focus on regulating emotion. Based on evidence for structural and functional preservation of the amygdala in older adults and findings that older adults show greater prefrontal cortex activity than younger adults while engaging in emotion-processing tasks, we argue that the cognitive control hypothesis is a more likely explanation for older adults’ positivity effect than the aging-brain model

Conventional and HD-tDCS May (or May Not) Modulate Overt Attentional Orienting: An Integrated Spatio-Temporal Approach and Methodological Reflections.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has been employed to modulate visuo-spatial attentional asymmetries, however, further investigation is needed to characterize tDCS-associated variability in more ecological settings. In the present research, we tested the effects of offline, anodal conventional tDCS (Experiment 1) and HD-tDCS (Experiment 2) delivered over the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and Frontal Eye Field (FEF) of the right hemisphere in healthy participants. Attentional asymmetries were measured by means of an eye tracking-based, ecological paradigm, that is, a Free Visual Exploration task of naturalistic pictures. Data were analyzed from a spatiotemporal perspective. In Experiment 1, a pre-post linear mixed model (LMM) indicated a leftward attentional shift after PPC tDCS; this effect was not confirmed when the individual baseline performance was considered. In Experiment 2, FEF HD-tDCS was shown to induce a significant leftward shift of gaze position, which emerged after 6 s of picture exploration and lasted for 200 ms. The present results do not allow us to conclude on a clear efficacy of offline conventional tDCS and HD-tDCS in modulating overt visuospatial attention in an ecological setting. Nonetheless, our findings highlight a complex relationship among stimulated area, focality of stimulation, spatiotemporal aspects of deployment of attention, and the role of individual baseline performance in shaping the effects of tDCS

Longitudinal change in executive function is associated with impaired top-down frontolimbic regulation during reappraisal in older adults

Networks in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) that are important for executive function are also engaged in adaptive responding to negative events. These networks are particularly vulnerable to age-related structural atrophy and an associated loss of executive function, yet existing evidence suggests preserved emotion processing ability in ageing. Using longitudinally acquired data from a battery of cognitive tasks, we defined a metric for the rate of decline of executive function. With this metric, we investigated relationships between changes in executive function and emotion reappraisal ability and brain structure, in 34 older adults, using functional and structural MRI. During task-based fMRI, participants were asked to cognitively reappraise negatively valenced images. We hypothesised one of two associations with decreasing executive function over time: 1) a decreased ability to reappraise reflected in decreased PFC and increased amygdala activation, or 2) a neural compensation mechanism characterised by increased PFC activation but no differential amygdala activation. Structurally, for a decreased reappraisal ability, we predicted a decrease in grey matter in PFC and/or a decrease of white matter integrity in amygdala-PFC pathways. Neither of the two hypotheses relating to brain function were completely supported, with the findings indicating a steeper decline in executive function associated with both increased PFC and increased left amygdala activity when reappraising negative stimuli. In addition, white matter integrity of the uncinate fasciculus, a primary white matter tract connecting the amygdala and ventromedial areas of PFC, was lower in those individuals who demonstrated a greater decrease in executive function. These findings highlight the association of diminishing cognitive ability with brain structure and function linked to emotion regulation