Capacity and tendency: A neuroscientific framework for the study of emotion regulation.

It is widely accepted that the ability to effectively regulate one's emotions is a cornerstone of physical and mental health. As such, it should come as no surprise that the number of neuroimaging studies focused on emotion regulation and associated processes has increased exponentially in the past decade. To date, neuroimaging research on this topic has examined two distinct but complementary features of emotion regulation - the capacity to effectively utilize a strategy to regulate emotion and to a lesser extent, the tendency to choose to regulate. However, theoretical accounts of emotion regulation have only recently begun to distinguish capacity from tendency. In the present review, we provide a novel framework for conceptualizing these two intertwined, yet distinct, facets of emotion regulation. First we characterize brain regions that support emotion generation and are thus targeted by emotion regulation. Next, we synthesize findings from the dozens of neuroimaging studies that have examined emotion regulation capacity, focusing in particular on the most commonly studied emotion regulation strategy - reappraisal. Finally, we discuss emerging neuroimaging research examining state and trait regulatory tendencies. We conclude by integrating findings from neuroimaging research on emotion regulation capacity and tendency and suggest ways that this integrated model can inform basic and translational neuroscientific research on emotion regulation

Mother still knows best: Maternal influence uniquely modulates adolescent reward sensitivity during risk taking

Adolescent decision-making is highly sensitive to input from the social environment. In particular, adult and maternal presence influence adolescents to make safer decisions when encountered with risky scenarios. However, it is currently unknown whether maternal presence confers a greater advantage than mere adult presence in buffering adolescent risk taking. In the current study, 23 adolescents completed a risk-taking task during an fMRI scan in the presence of their mother and an unknown adult. Results reveal that maternal presence elicits greater activation in reward-related neural circuits when making safe decisions but decreased activation following risky choices. Moreover, adolescents evidenced a more immature neural phenotype when making risky choices in the presence of an adult compared to mother, as evidenced by positive functional coupling between the ventral striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Our results underscore the importance of maternal stimuli in bolstering adolescent decision-making in risky scenarios

Is social decision making for close others consistent across domains and within individuals?

Humans make decisions across a variety of social contexts. Though social decision-making research has blossomed in recent decades, surprisingly little is known about whether social decision-making preferences are consistent across different domains. We conducted an exploratory study in which participants made choices about 2 types of close others: parents and friends. To elicit decision making preferences, we pit the interests in parents and friends against one another. To assess the consistency of preferences for close others, decision making was assessed in three domains-risk taking, probabilistic learning, and self-other similarity judgments. We reasoned that if social decision-making preferences are consistent across domains, participants ought to exhibit the same preference in all three domains (i.e., a parent preference, based on prior work), and individual differences in preference magnitude ought to be conserved across domains within individuals. A combination of computational modeling, random coefficient regression, and traditional statistical tests revealed a robust parent-over-friend preference in the risk taking and probabilistic learning domains but not the self-other similarity domain. Preferences for parent-over-friend in the risk-taking domain were strongly associated with similar preferences in the probabilistic learning domain but not the self-other similarity domain. These results suggest that distinct and dissociable value-based and social-cognitive computations underlie social decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Spatial and temporal cortical variability track with age and affective experience during emotion regulation in youth.

Variability is a fundamental feature of human brain activity that is particularly pronounced during development. However, developmental neuroimaging research has only recently begun to move beyond characterizing brain function exclusively in terms of magnitude of neural activation to incorporate estimates of variability. No prior neuroimaging study has done so in the domain of emotion regulation. We investigated how age and affective experiences relate to spatial and temporal variability in neural activity during emotion regulation. In the current study, 70 typically developing youth aged 8 to 17 years completed a cognitive reappraisal task of emotion regulation while undergoing functional MRI. Estimates of spatial and temporal variability during regulation were calculated across a network of brain regions, defined a priori, and were then related to age and affective experiences. Results showed that increasing age was associated with reduced spatial and temporal variability in a set of frontoparietal regions (e.g., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, superior parietal lobule) known to be involved in effortful emotion regulation. In addition, youth who reported less negative affect during regulation had less spatial variability in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which has previously been linked to cognitive reappraisal. We interpret age-related reductions in spatial and temporal variability as implying neural specialization. These results suggest that the development of emotion regulation is undergirded by a process of neural specialization and open a host of possibilities for incorporating neural variability into the study of emotion regulation development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

The Neural Development of ‘Us and Them’

Social groups aid human beings in several ways, ranging from the fulfillment of complex social and personal needs to the promotion of survival. Despite the importance of group affiliation to humans, there remains considerable variation in group preferences across development. In the current study, children and adolescents completed an explicit evaluation task of in-group and out-group members during functional neuroimaging. We found that participants displayed age-related increases in bilateral amygdala, fusiform gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activation when viewing in-group relative to out-group faces. Moreover, we found an indirect effect of age on in-group favoritism via brain activation in the amygdala, fusiform and OFC. Finally, with age, youth showed greater functional coupling between the amygdala and several neural regions when viewing in-group relative to out-group peers, suggesting a role of the amygdala in directing attention to motivationally relevant cues. Our findings suggest that the motivational significance and processing of group membership undergoes important changes across development

Changes in Family Cohesion and Links to Depression during the College Transition

Parent relationships remain an important component in the lives of adolescents, with particular respect to their well-being. In the current study, we sought to understand how changes in family cohesion across the high school-college transition may be related to changes in depressive symptoms. Three hundred and thirty-eight college freshman completed self-report measures prior to attending college and again two months into their first semester. Although depressive symptoms significantly increased, adolescents who reported increases in family cohesion reported declines in depressive symptoms during the college transition. Furthermore, this effect was mediated by changes in self-esteem and optimism. Finally, we show unique associations for male and female adolescents, such that changes in family cohesion were only related to changes in depression for girls. Results suggest that parent relationships may buffer against increased depressive symptoms during this important transition period.Ope

Apples to apples? Neural correlates of emotion regulation differences between high- and low-risk adolescents

Adolescence has been noted as a period of increased risk taking. The literature on normative neurodevelopment implicates aberrant activation of affective and regulatory regions as key to inhibitory failures. However, many of these studies have not included adolescents engaging in high rates of risky behavior, making generalizations to the most at-risk populations potentially problematic. We conducted a comparative study of nondelinquent community (n = 24, mean age = 15.8 years, 12 female) and delinquent adolescents (n = 24, mean age = 16.2 years, 12 female) who completed a cognitive control task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, where behavioral inhibition was assessed in the presence of appetitive and aversive socioaffective cues. Community adolescents showed poorer behavioral regulation to appetitive relative to aversive cues, whereas the delinquent sample showed the opposite pattern. Recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus, medial prefrontal cortex, and tempoparietal junction differentiated community and high-risk adolescents, as delinquent adolescents showed significantly greater recruitment when inhibiting their responses in the presence of aversive cues, while the community sample showed greater recruitment when inhibiting their responses in the presence of appetitive cues. Accounting for behavioral history may be key in understanding when adolescents will have regulatory difficulties, highlighting a need for comparative research into normative and nonnormative risk-taking trajectories