Neural correlates of up-regulating positive emotions in fMRI and their link to affect in daily life

Emotion regulation is typically used to down-regulate negative or up-regulate positive emotions. While there is considerable evidence for the neural correlates of the former, less is known about the neural correlates of the latter—and how they are associated with emotion regulation and affect in daily life. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired from 63 healthy young participants (22 ± 1.6 years, 30 female), while they up-regulated their emotions to positive and neutral images or passively watched them. The same participants’ daily affect and emotion regulation behavior was measured using experience sampling over 10 days. Focusing on the ventral striatum (VS), previously associated with positive affective processing, we found increased activation during the up-regulation to both positive and neutral images. VS activation for the former positively correlated with between- and within-person differences in self-reported affective valence during fMRI but was not significantly associated with up-regulation in daily life. However, participants with lower daily affect showed a stronger association between changes in affect and activation in emotion-related (medial frontal and subcortical) regions—including the VS. These results support the involvement of the VS in up-regulating positive emotions and suggest a neurobehavioral link between emotion-related brain activation and daily affect

THE NEURAL CORRELATES OF EMOTION REGULATION AND URGENCY

poster abstractRecent studies have indicated five distinct facets of impulsivity related personality traits—each differentially related to risky behaviors. These facets are: sensation seeking, positive and negative urgency, premeditation, and perseverance. Urgency, defined as a tendency to behave impulsively in face of strong emotions, has been found to be the most consistent predictor of a number of problematic risky behaviors—including problematic substance use, pathological gambling, and problematic eating behaviors. It has been theorized that this relationship between urgency and problematic risky be-haviors can be attributed to an underlying dysfunction in the ability to regu-late emotions. No studies have examined the neural correlates of the urgen-cy facets. However, prior studies have looked at the neural correlates of emotion regulation, which is an aspect of the urgency facets. The intention of this poster is to review the neural correlates of emotion regulation in or-der to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the urgency facets. Our review of the literature indicates that the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex are involved in emotion regulation. Particularly, emotion regulation processes may be attributed to the independent and syn-ergistic functioning of these regions. These findings indicate that urgency and possibly other impulsivity related personality traits may have measura-ble neural correlates. Moreover, these findings also introduce the possibility of targeting neural dysfunctions in order to reduce emotionally driven impul-siveness and consequent problematic behaviors

Emotion Regulation in Adolescents: Influences of Social Cognition and Object Relations – An ERP study

Abstract Aims: The use of emotion regulation strategies can reduce the intensity of negative experiences; event related potentials (ERP) specifically the late positive potential (LPP) is known to be sensitive to this reduction in adults. It is argued that individual differences play an important role in one‘s ability to regulate emotions. The current study aimed to explore neural correlates of emotion regulation in adolescents. The study aimed to replicate previous findings from studies on adult populations, to show that emotion regulation is associated with changes in the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) in adolescents. It also aimed to examine neural changes associated with emotion regulation as a function of age and explore age-related differences in the scalp localisation of emotion regulation in adolescents. The study also aimed to explore whether individual differences, specifically the quality of internal representations of relationships, can predict neural activity associated with emotion regulation. Method: Event related potentials (ERP) of 53 adolescents (12 to 17 years old) performing an emotion regulation task were recorded. The social cognition and object relations scale (SCORS; Westen, 1995) was utilised in a narrative interview to obtain data about the quality of mental representations of relationships. Results: The study confirmed that the use of emotion regulation modulated the LPP in adolescence early in the emotion generation process. A relationship between the changes in the LPP and the age of the participants has been established, indicating that emotion regulation became more effortless with age. The study found that the quality of mental representations of relationships was able to significantly predict LPP amplitude related to emotion regulation. Conclusions: The findings suggest that emotion regulation becomes more effortless with age, and that internal representations of relationships are closely implicated in the ability to regulate emotions

Flexibly adapting to emotional cues: Examining the functional and structural correlates of emotional reactivity and emotion control in healthy and depressed individuals

The ability of emotionally significant stimuli to bias our behaviour is an evolutionarily adaptive phenomenon. However, sometimes emotions become excessive, inappropriate, and even pathological, like in major depressive disorder (MDD). Emotional flexibility includes both the neural processes involved in reacting to, or representing, emotional significance, and those involved in controlling emotional reactivity. MDD represents a potentially distinct form of emotion (in)flexibility, and therefore offers a unique perspective for understanding both the integration of conflicting emotional cues and the neural regions involved in actively controlling emotional systems. The present investigation of emotional flexibility began by considering the functional neural correlates of competing socio-emotional cues and effortful emotion regulation in MDD using both negative and positive emotions. Study 1 revealed greater amygdala activity in MDD relative to control participants when negative cues were centrally presented and task-relevant. No significant between-group differences were observed in the amygdala for peripheral task-irrelevant negative distracters. However, controls demonstrated greater recruitment of the ventrolateral (vlPFC) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices (dmPFC) implicated in emotion control. Conversely, attenuated amygdala activity for task-relevant and irrelevant positive cues was observed in depressed participants. In Study 2, effortful emotion regulation using strategies adapted from cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) revealed greater activity in regions of the dorsal and lateral prefrontal cortices in both MDD and control participants when attempting to either down-regulate negative or up-regulate positive emotions. During the down-regulation of negative cues, only controls displayed a significant reduction of amygdala activity. In Study 3, an individual differences approach using multiple regression revealed that while greater amygdala-vmPFC structural connectivity was associated with low trait-anxiety, greater connectivity between amygdala and regions of occipitotemporal and parietal cortices was associated with high trait-anxiety. These findings are discussed with respect to current models of emotional reactivity and emotion control derived from studies of both healthy individuals and those with emotional disorders, particularly depression. The focus is on amygdala variability in differing contexts, the role of the vmPFC in the modulation of amygdala activity via learning processes, and the modulation of emotion by attention or cognitive control mechanisms initiated by regions of frontoparietal cortices

Fronto-Limbic Brain Dysfunction during the Regulation of Emotion in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is characterized by significant and widespread impairments in the regulation of emotion. Evidence is only recently emerging regarding the neural basis of these emotion regulation impairments, and few studies have focused on the regulation of emotion during effortful cognitive processing. To examine the neural correlates of deficits in effortful emotion regulation, schizophrenia outpatients (N = 20) and age- and gender-matched healthy volunteers (N = 20) completed an emotional faces n-back task to assess the voluntary attentional control subprocess of emotion regulation during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Behavioral measures of emotional intelligence and emotion perception were administered to examine brain-behavior relationships with emotion processing outcomes. Results indicated that patients with schizophrenia demonstrated significantly greater activation in the bilateral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal, and right orbitofrontal cortices during the effortful regulation of positive emotional stimuli, and reduced activity in these same regions when regulating negative emotional information. The opposite pattern of results was observed in healthy individuals. Greater fronto-striatal response to positive emotional distractors was significantly associated with deficits in facial emotion recognition. These findings indicate that abnormalities in striatal and prefrontal cortical systems may be related to deficits in the effortful emotion regulatory process of attentional control in schizophrenia, and may significantly contribute to emotion processing deficits in the disorder

Resting heart rate variability is associated with neural adaptation when repeatedly exposed to emotional stimuli.

Higher heart rate variability (HRV) at rest is associated with better emotion regulation ability. While the neurovisceral integration model explains this by postulating that HRV can index how the brain adaptively modulates responses to emotional stimuli, neuroimaging studies directly supporting this idea are scarce. We examined the neural correlates of regulating negative and positive emotion in relation to resting HRV based on the neuroimaging and heart rate data of one hundred young adults. The results showed that those with higher HRV better recruit the medial prefrontal cortex while intensifying positive compared to negative emotion. We also examined how individual differences in resting HRV are associated with adjusting brain activity to repeated emotional stimuli. During repeated viewing of emotional images, subjects with higher resting HRV better reduced activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate gyrus, and angular gyrus, most of which overlapped with the default mode network. This HRV-DMN association was observed during passively viewing emotional images rather than during actively regulating emotion. While the regulating trials can better detect task-induced changes, the viewing trials might approximate resting state, better revealing individual differences. These findings suggest two possibilities: people with higher resting HRV might have a tendency to spontaneously engage with emotion regulation or possess a trait helping emotional arousal fade away

Association between positive emotion regulation strategies and the reward positivity

Emotion regulation dysfunction is a core feature of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Recently, research has begun to focus on positive emotion regulation strategies such as dampening and savoring of positive emotion. Dampening has been associated with higher depressive symptoms, higher symptoms of anhedonia, higher negative affect, and lower positive affect, whereas savoring has been associated with well-being and lower depressive symptoms. A separate area of MDD research -- reward processing and its neural correlates -- has yielded a similar pattern of findings. A blunted response to rewards has beenrepeatedly associated with depression in both behavioral and psychophysiological studies. In Event-Related Potential (ERP) studies, this blunted response is captured by the ERP component, Reward Positivity (RewP). The current study aims to examine the psychophysiological underpinnings of depression and its association with dysfunctional reward processing by exploring the RewP's relationship with positive emotion regulation strategies. N=100 participants completed two computerized gambling tasks while ERPs were recorded, as well as a battery of questionnaires assessing a variety of depressive symptoms and emotion regulation strategies. Consistent with previous literature, dampening was associated with higher depressive symptoms, while savoring was associated with lower depressive symptoms. Interestingly, the RewP response was largely unassociated with depressive symptoms and emotion regulation strategies. However, there is some evidence that the RewP is malleable with a simple savoring intervention. Such findings may provide insight into the underpinnings of depression and have implications for clinical prevention and intervention efforts for MDD.Includes bibliographical reference

Emotion regulation in adolescents: An ERP study

AIMS: The use of emotion regulation strategies can reduce the intensity of negative emotional experiences. Event related potentials (ERPs), specifically the late positive potential (LPP), are known to be sensitive to this modulation in adults. This is the first study to explore the neural correlates of expressive suppression in adolescents. We sought to replicate previous findings from emotion regulation studies with adult populations, show that the LPP can be modulated by expressive suppression in healthy adolescents, and examine the influence of age on LPP changes. METHOD: ERPs of 53 healthy adolescents (12 to 17 years old) performing an emotion regulation task (expressive suppression) were recorded. RESULTS: Expressive suppression altered the LPP in adolescents with both increases and decreases noted depending on time window and recording site. The LPP during expressive suppression was decreased with increasing age. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that 1) the LPP is an effective tool to study processes associated with emotion regulation in adolescents, and 2) expressive suppression, in terms of its neural indicators, seems to become more effective with age. The nature and utility of expressive suppression as a specific form of emotion regulation in adolescents are discussed

Emotionally painful:insights in pain-related conditions with anomalies in emotion processing and regulation

Emotions and pain are inherent to human experience, and both are related. For example, it is known that the intensity of pain can be modified by the emotions experienced. Nevertheless, the relationship between emotions and pain is not fully understood. The aim of this thesis was to add knowledge on emotions and pain in the context of pain-related conditions with anomalies in emotion processing and regulation. First, the prevalence rates of depression, anxiety and alexithymia in disorders with central sensitization and chronic pain were summarised. We found high prevalence rates for the three psychological conditions in such disorders. Next, we studied the neural correlates of emotion processing and regulation in fibromyalgia, a chronic widespread pain condition. We found that brain connectivity of regions previously related to pain modulation is affected during the processing and regulation of positive and negative emotional stimuli in fibromyalgia. Furthermore, alterations during resting state related to alexithymia were found. Finally, we studied the intrinsic brain connectivity of areas related to emotion regulation in borderline personality disorder, which is characterised by emotion dysregulation and alterations in pain processing. Our study focused on the interaction with cocaine dependence, a frequent comorbidity. Overall, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of disorders characterised by pain and emotion processing and regulation difficulties, and points at future directions to improve the treatment of patients with such conditions. Additionally, it highlights the importance of acknowledging emotions when treating patients with pain conditions

Put on your poker face? Neural systems supporting the anticipation for expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal

It is a unique human ability to regulate negative thoughts and feelings. Two well-investigated emotion-regulation strategies (ERSs), cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, are associated with overlapping prefrontal neural correlates, but differ temporally during the emotion-generation process. Although functional imaging studies have mainly investigated these ERS as a reaction to an emotion-inducing event, the intention to regulate upcoming negative emotions might already be associated with differences in neural activity. Hence, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was recorded in 42 participants while they completed an emotion-regulation paradigm. During this task, participants were instructed to proactively prepare to use a specific ERS knowing that a negative, high-arousing image would appear after the preparation period. As expected, the results demonstrated prefrontal and parietal activation while participants were suppressing or reappraising their emotions (family-wise error (FWE)-corrected). The intention to suppress emotions was associated with increased activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral putamen, pre-supplementary motor area and right supramarginal gyrus (FWE-corrected). This enhanced proactive inhibitory control: (i) predicted decreased motoric activity during the actual suppression of emotional expressions and (2) trended toward a significant association with how successfully participants suppressed their emotions. However, neural correlates of preparatory control for cognitive reappraisal were not observed, possibly because contextual cues about the upcoming emotional stimulus are necessary to proactively start to cognitively reinterpret the situation