Emotion regulation

Synonyms: emotional control; emotion-related self-regulation; stress-regulation; mood-regulation; affect-regulation; emotional intelligence Definition: Emotion regulation refers to the conscious or unconscious processes of monitoring, evaluating, modulating, and managing emotional experiences and expression of emotion in terms of intensity, form, and duration of feelings, emotion-related physiological states and behaviors

Toward a radically embodied neuroscience of attachment and relationships?

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982) posits the existence of internal working models as a foundational feature of human bonds. Radical embodied approaches instead suggest that cognition requires no computation or representation, favoring a cognition situated in a body in an environmental context with affordances for action (Chemero, 2009; Barrett, 2011; Wilson and Golonka, 2013; Casasanto and Lupyan, 2015). We explore whether embodied approaches to social soothing, interpersonal warmth, separation distress, and support seeking could replace representational constructs such as internal working models with a view of relationship cognition anchored in the resources afforded to the individual by their brain, body, and environment in interaction. We review the neurobiological bases for social attachments and relationships and attempt to delineate how these systems overlap or don’t with more basic physiological systems in ways that support or contradict a radical embodied explanation. We suggest that many effects might be the result of the fact that relationship cognition depends on and emerges out of the action of neural systems that regulate several clearly physically grounded systems. For example, the neuropeptide oxytocin appears to be central to attachment and pair-bond behavior (Carter and Keverne, 2002) and is implicated in social thermoregulation more broadly, being necessary for maintaining a warm body temperature (for a review, see IJzerman et al., 2015b). Finally, we discuss the most challenging issues around taking a radically embodied perspective on social relationships. We find the most crucial challenge in individual differences in support seeking and responses to social contact, which have long been thought to be a function of representational structures in the mind (e.g., Baldwin, 1995). Together we entertain the thought to explain such individual differences without mediating representations or computations, but in the end propose a hybrid model of radical embodiment and internal representations

The social regulation of threat-related attentional disengagement in highly anxious individuals

Social support may normalize stress reactivity among highly anxious individuals, yet little research has examined anxious reactions in social contexts. We examined the role of both state and trait anxiety in the link between social support and the neural response to threat. We employed an fMRI paradigm in which participants faced the threat of electric shock under three conditions: alone, holding a stranger’s hand, and holding a friend’s hand. We found significant interactions between trait anxiety and threat condition in regions including the hypothalamus, putamen, precentral gyrus, and precuneus. Analyses revealed that highly trait anxious individuals were less active in each of these brain regions while alone in the scanner—a pattern that suggests the attentional disengagement associated with the perception of high intensity threats. These findings support past research suggesting that individuals high in anxiety tend to have elevated neural responses to mild or moderate threats but paradoxically lower responses to high intensity threats, suggesting a curvilinear relationship between anxiety and threat responding. We hypothesize that for highly anxious individuals, shock cues were perceived as highly threatening if they were alone in the scanner, possibly due to attentional disengagement, but this perception was mitigated if they were holding someone’s hand. The disengagement seen in highly anxious people under conditions of high perceived threat may thus be alleviated by social proximity. These results suggest a role for social support in regulating emotional responses in anxious individuals, which may aid in treatment outcomes

Relationship status and perceived support in the social regulation of neural responses to threat

Strong social ties correspond with better health and well being, but the neural mechanisms linking social contact to health remain speculative. This study extends work on the social regulation of brain activity by supportive handholding in 110 participants (51 female) of diverse racial and socioeconomic origins. In addition to main effects of social regulation by handholding, we assessed the moderating effects of both perceived social support and relationship status (married, cohabiting, dating or platonic friends). Results suggest that, under threat of shock, handholding by familiar relational partners attenuates both subjective distress and activity in a network associated with salience, vigilance and regulatory self-control. Moreover, greater perceived social support corresponded with less brain activity in an extended network associated with similar processes, but only during partner handholding. In contrast, we did not observe any regulatory effects of handholding by strangers, and relationship status did not moderate the regulatory effects of partner handholding. These findings suggest that contact with a familiar relational partner is likely to attenuate subjective distress and a variety of neural responses associated with the presence of threat. This effect is likely enhanced by an individual's expectation of the availability of support from their wider social network.National Institute of Mental Health [R01MH080725]Open Access Journal.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Mom—It Helps When You're Right Here! Attenuation of Neural Stress Markers in Anxious Youths Whose Caregivers Are Present during fMRI

Close proximity to an attachment figure, such as a caregiver, has been shown to attenuate threat-related activity in limbic regions such as the hypothalamus in healthy individuals. We hypothesized that such features might be similarly attenuated by proximity during a potentially stressful situation in a clinically anxious population of youths. Confirmation of this hypothesis could support the role of attachment figures in the management of anxiety among children and adolescents. Three groups were analyzed: anxious children and adolescents who requested that their caregiver accompany them in the scanner room, anxious children and adolescents without their caregiver in the scanner room and healthy controls (each of N = 10). The groups were matched for age and, among the two anxious groups, for diagnosis (mean age 9.5). The children and adolescents were exposed to physical threat words during an fMRI assessment. Results indicate that activity in the hypothalamus, ventromedial, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex were significantly reduced in anxious children and adolescents who requested that their caregiver accompany them in the scanner room compared to those without their caregiver in the scanner room. Mean activity in these regions in anxious children and adolescents with their caregiver in the scanner room was comparable to that of healthy controls. These data suggest links between social contact and neural mechanisms of emotional reactivity; specifically, presence of caregivers moderates the increase in anxiety seen with stressful stimuli. Capitalizing on the ability of anxious youths to manifest low levels of anxiety-like information processing in the presence of a caregiver could help in modeling adaptive function in behavioral treatments