Neural mechanisms of implicit cognitive reappraisal: Preceding descriptions alter emotional response to unpleasant images

Emotion-related impulsivity and suicidal ideation and behavior in schizophrenia spectrum disorder: a pilot fMRI study

Introduction

Suicidal ideation and behavior (SIB) are serious problems in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). Nevertheless, relatively little is known about the circuitry underlying SIB in SSD. Recently, we showed that elevated emotional impulsivity (urgency) was associated with SIB in SSD. Here we examined brain activity in people with SSD and elevated SIB.

Methods

We tested 16 people with SSD who had low SIB and 14 people with high SIB on a task in which emotion regulation in response to affective pictures was implicitly manipulated using spoken sentences. Thus, there were neutral pictures preceded by neutral statements (NeutNeut condition), as well as negative pictures preceded by either negative (NegNeg) or neutral (NeutNeg) statements. After each picture, participants rated how unpleasant each picture was for them. The latter two conditions were compared to the NeutNeut condition. We compared the emotion-regulated condition (NeutNeg) to the unregulated condition (NeutNeut). Statistics were threshold using threshold free cluster enhancement (TFCE).

Results

People in the low SIB group showed higher activation in this contrast in medial frontal gyrus, right rostral anterior cingulate, bilateral superior frontal gyrus/DLPFC, and right middle cingulate gyrus, as well as right superior temporal gyrus.

Discussion

This study provides clues to the neural basis of SIB in SSD as well as underlying mechanisms.

GC-STCL: A Granger Causality-Based Spatial-Temporal Contrastive Learning Framework for EEG Emotion Recognition

EEG signals capture information through multi-channel electrodes and hold promising prospects for human emotion recognition. However, the presence of high levels of noise and the diverse nature of EEG signals pose significant challenges, leading to potential overfitting issues that further complicate the extraction of meaningful information. To address this issue, we propose a Granger causal-based spatial-temporal contrastive learning framework, which significantly enhances the ability to capture EEG signal information by modeling rich spatial-temporal relationships. Specifically, in the spatial dimension, we employ a sampling strategy to select positive sample pairs from individuals watching the same video. Subsequently, a Granger causality test is utilized to enhance graph data and construct potential causality for each channel. Finally, a residual graph convolutional neural network is employed to extract features from EEG signals and compute spatial contrast loss. In the temporal dimension, we first apply a frequency domain noise reduction module for data enhancement on each time series. Then, we introduce the Granger-Former model to capture time domain representation and calculate the time contrast loss. We conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available sentiment recognition datasets (DEAP and SEED), achieving 1.65% improvement of the DEAP dataset and 1.55% improvement of the SEED dataset compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised models. Our method outperforms benchmark methods in terms of prediction accuracy as well as interpretability.

Shared and distinct prefrontal cortex alterations of implicit emotion regulation in depression and anxiety: An fNIRS investigation

BACKGROUND

Emotion regulation deficits, particularly in cognitive reappraisal, are crucial in depression and anxiety. However, research on the neural mechanisms of implicit emotion regulation is lacking, and it remains unclear whether these mechanisms are shared or distinct between the two disorders.

METHODS

We investigated the neural mechanisms of implicit cognitive reappraisal in 28 individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD), 25 with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and 30 healthy controls (HC) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Participants completed an implicit cognitive reappraisal task and underwent neuropsychological and clinical assessments.

RESULTS

We found that MDD patients reported higher levels of rumination and lower utilization of cognitive reappraisal, while GAD patients reported reduced use of perspective-taking. Notably, both MDD and GAD patients exhibited decreased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) compared to HC participants during implicit cognitive reappraisal. Specifically, inadequate OFC activation was observed in MDD patients, while GAD patients demonstrated OFC deactivation during the task. Furthermore, DLPFC activation showed a negative correlation with depression severity in MDD patients, while OFC activation was positively correlated with perspective-taking in GAD patients.

LIMITATIONS

fNIRS has limited depth and spatial resolution.

CONCLUSION

Our fNIRS study is the first to reveal shared and distinct neurobiological profiles of depression and anxiety in implicit emotion regulation. These findings underscore the significance of reduced DLPFC/OFC activation in emotion regulation impairment and highlight unique OFC activation patterns in these disorders. These insights have potential implications for developing cognitive-behavioral therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation as treatment approaches.

Implicit induction of expressive suppression in regulation of happy crowd emotions

Implicit emotion regulation provides an effective means of controlling emotions triggered by a single face without conscious awareness and effort. Crowd emotion has been proposed to be perceived as more intense than it actually is, but it is still unclear how to regulate it implicitly. In this study, participants viewed sets of faces of varying emotionality (e.g. happy to angry) and estimated the mean emotion of each set after being primed with an expressive suppression goal, a cognitive reappraisal goal, or a neutral goal. Faster discrimination for happy than angry crowds was observed. After induction of the expressive suppression goal instead of the cognitive reappraisal goal, augmented N170 and early posterior negativity (EPN) amplitudes, as well as attenuated late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes, were observed in response to happy crowds compared to the neutral goal. Differential processing of angry crowds was not observed after the induction of both regulatory goals compared to the neutral goal. Our findings thus reveal the happy-superiority effect and that implicit induction of expressive suppression improves happy crowd emotion recognition, promotes selective coding, and successfully downregulates the neural response to happy crowds.

Resting-state cortico-limbic functional connectivity pattern in panic disorder: Relationships with emotion regulation strategy use and symptom severity

Cognitive reappraisal is an effective emotion regulation strategy involving prefrontal cortex (PFC) control of the amygdala. Its aberrant functioning is closely associated with panic disorder (PD). However, the resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) between the PFC, implicated in cognitive reappraisal, and the amygdala in PD has not been studied. Thus, this study aims to investigate the rsFC patterns and their association with cognitive reappraisal and PD. This study involved 51 participants, including 26 untreated patients with PD and 25 healthy controls (HC). We evaluated the habit of cognitive reappraisal assessment and the severity of PD using neuropsychological and clinical measures. Resting-state fMRI was utilized to evaluate the rsFC pattern between the PFC, engaged in cognitive reappraisal, and the amygdala. Mediation analysis was performed to explore the role of this rsFC in the relationship between cognitive reappraisal and PD severity. PD patients showed reduced rsFC between the PFC and the amygdala compared to HC. This weakened rsFC was associated with the severity of PD symptoms. Moreover, cognitive reappraisal was negatively correlated with PD severity, and mediation analysis indicated that the rsFC of the PFC-amygdala played a mediating role in this association. Abnormal PFC-amygdala rsFC may play a pivotal role in PD development and/or manifestation and mediate the association between cognitive reappraisal and PD severity, potentially serving as a clinical indicator for monitoring and intervention.

Can Brain Activities of Guided Metaphorical Restructuring Predict Therapeutic Changes?

The present study examined whether brain activities of metaphorical restructuring could predict improvements in emotion and general self-efficacy (GSES). Sixty-two anxious graduates were randomly assigned to either the metaphor group (n = 31) or the literal group (n = 31). After completing the pretest (T1), the participants were first presented with micro-counseling dialogues (MCD) to guide metaphorical or literal restructuring, and their functional brain activities were simultaneously recorded. They then completed the posttest (T2) and 1 week's follow-up (T3). It was found that (1) compared with the literal group, the metaphor group had more insightful experiences, a greater increase in positive affect and GSES at T2, and a greater decrease in psychological distress at T2 and T3; (2) the metaphor group showed a greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and bilateral temporal gyrus, and further activation in the left hippocampus positively predicted T2 GSES scores while that in the IFG and left hippocampus positively predicted the reduction slope of distress over the three time points. One important limitation is that the results should be interpreted with caution when generalizing to clinical anxiety samples due to the participants were graduate students with anxiety symptoms rather than clinical sample. These results indicated that metaphor restructuring produced greater symptom improvements, and activation in the hippocampus and IFG could predict these symptom improvements. This suggests that the activation of the two regions during the restructuring intervention may be a neural marker for symptom improvements.

Implicit, But Not Explicit, Emotion Regulation Relieves Unpleasant Neural Responses Evoked by High-Intensity Negative Images

Evidence suggests that explicit reappraisal has limited regulatory effects on high-intensity emotions, mainly due to the depletion of cognitive resources occupied by the high-intensity emotional stimulus itself. The implicit form of reappraisal has proved to be resource-saving and therefore might be an ideal strategy to achieve the desired regulatory effect in high-intensity situations. In this study, we explored the regulatory effect of explicit and implicit reappraisal when participants encountered low- and high-intensity negative images. The subjective emotional rating indicated that both explicit and implicit reappraisal down-regulated negative experiences, irrespective of intensity. However, the amplitude of the parietal late positive potential (LPP; a neural index of experienced emotional intensity) showed that only implicit reappraisal had significant regulatory effects in the high-intensity context, though both explicit and implicit reappraisal successfully reduced the emotional neural responses elicited by low-intensity negative images. Meanwhile, implicit reappraisal led to a smaller frontal LPP amplitude (an index of cognitive cost) compared to explicit reappraisal, indicating that the implementation of implicit reappraisal consumes limited cognitive control resources. Furthermore, we found a prolonged effect of implicit emotion regulation introduced by training procedures. Taken together, these findings not only reveal that implicit reappraisal is suitable to relieve high-intensity negative experiences as well as neural responses, but also highlight the potential benefit of trained implicit regulation in clinical populations whose frontal control resources are limited.

Think again: the role of reappraisal in reducing negative valence bias

Stimuli such as surprised faces are ambiguous in that they are associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Interestingly, people differ reliably in whether they evaluate these and other ambiguous stimuli as positive or negative, and we have argued that a positive evaluation relies in part on a biasing of the appraisal processes via reappraisal. To further test this idea, we conducted two studies to evaluate whether increasing the cognitive accessibility of reappraisal through a brief emotion regulation task would lead to an increase in positive evaluations of ambiguity. Supporting this prediction, we demonstrated that cuing reappraisal, but not in three other forms of emotion regulation (Study 1a-d; n = 120), increased positive evaluations of ambiguous faces. In a sign of robustness, we also found that the effect of reappraisal generalised from ambiguous faces to ambiguous scenes (Study 2; n = 34). Collectively, these findings suggest that reappraisal may play a key role in determining responses to ambiguous stimuli. We discuss these findings in the context of affective flexibility, and suggest that valence bias (i.e. the tendency to evaluate ambiguity more positively or negatively) represents a novel approach to measuring implicit emotion regulation.

Offline rTMS inhibition of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex impairs reappraisal efficacy

In this study we verified the causal role of the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in emotional regulation using a strategy of reappraisal, which involves intentionally changing the meaning of an affective event to reduce its emotional impact. Healthy participants (n = 26; mean age = 25.4) underwent three sessions of inhibitory continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) applied on three different days over the left or right DLPFC, or the vertex. After applying the stimulation protocol participants were presented with neutral and negative pictorial stimuli that had to be either passively watched or reappraised. The efficacy of emotional control was quantified using the Late Positive Potential (LPP), the neural marker of motivated attention and elaborated stimulus processing. The results showed that reappraisal was compromised after inhibitory stimulation of the right DLPFC compared to the vertex. This impairment of affective modulation was reflected in both early (350-750 ms) and late (750-1500 ms) time windows. As no session differences during the passive watching conditions were found, the decrease in reappraisal efficacy due to non-specific changes in basic perceptual processing was considered unlikely. Instead, we suggest that inhibition of the right DLPFC primarily affects the top-down mechanism of attentional deployment. This results in disturbances of attentional processes that are necessary to thoroughly elaborate the content of affective stimuli to enable their new, less negative interpretation.

Neural correlations between cognitive deficits and emotion regulation strategies: understanding emotion dysregulation in depression from the perspective of cognitive control and cognitive biases

The link between cognitive function and emotion regulation may be helpful in better understanding the onset, maintenance, and treatment for depression. However, it remains unclear whether there are neural correlates between emotion dysregulation and cognitive deficits in depression. To address this question, we first review the neural representations of emotion dysregulation and cognitive deficits in depression (including deficits in cognitive control and cognitive biases). Based on the comparisons of neural representations of emotion dysregulation versus cognitive deficits, we propose an accessible and reasonable link between emotion dysregulation, cognitive control, and cognitive biases in depression. Specifically, cognitive control serves the whole process of emotion regulation, whereas cognitive biases are engaged in emotion regulation processes at different stages. Moreover, the abnormal implementation of different emotion regulation strategies in depression is consistently affected by cognitive control, which is involved in the dorsolateral, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex. Besides, the relationship between different emotion regulation strategies and cognitive biases in depression may be distinct: the orbitofrontal cortex contributes to the association between ineffective reappraisal and negative interpretation bias, while the subgenual prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex underline the tendency of depressed individuals to ruminate and overly engage in self-referential bias. This review sheds light on the relationship between cognitive deficits and emotion dysregulation in depression and identifies directions in need of future attention.

Maternal socioeconomic disadvantage, neural function during volitional emotion regulation, and parenting

The transition to becoming a mother involves numerous emotional challenges, and the ability to effectively keep negative emotions in check is critical for parenting. Evidence suggests that experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage interferes with parenting adaptations and alters neural processes related to emotion regulation. The present study examined whether socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with diminished neural activation while mothers engaged in volitional (i.e., purposeful) emotion regulation. 59 mothers, at an average of 4 months postpartum, underwent fMRI scanning and completed the Emotion Regulation Task (ERT). When asked to regulate emotions using reappraisal (i.e., Reappraise condition; reframing stimuli in order to decrease negative emotion), mothers with lower income-to-needs ratio exhibited dampened neural activation in the dorsolateral and ventrolateral PFC, middle frontal and middle temporal gyrus, and caudate. Without explicit instructions to down-regulate (i.e., Maintain condition), mothers experiencing lower income also exhibited dampened response in regulatory areas, including the middle frontal and middle temporal gyrus and caudate. Blunted middle frontal gyrus activation across both Reappraise and Maintain conditions was associated with reduced maternal sensitivity during a mother-child interaction task. Results of the present study demonstrate the influence of socioeconomic disadvantage on prefrontal engagement during emotion regulation, which may have downstream consequences for maternal behaviors.

The local neural markers of MRI in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy presenting ictal panic: A resting resting-state postictal fMRI study

OBJECTIVES

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is one of the most common focal epilepsies. Some patients with TLE have ictal panic (IP), which is often confused with panic attack (PA) in panic disorder (PD). Previous studies have described temporal lobe epilepsy with ictal panic (TLEIP), but the specific mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to investigate local brain abnormalities in patients with TLEIP and tried to find neural markers to explore the mechanism of IP in patients with TLE.

METHODS

A total of 40 patients with TLE, including 28 patients with TLE and 12 patients with TLEIP along with 30 age- and gender-matched healthy controls were included. We collected clinical/physiological/neuropsychological and rs-fMRI data. Fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (fALFF), regional homogeneity (ReHo), and degree centrality (DC) were calculated. ANOVA was used to find different areas and t-tests used to compare differences among fALFF, ReHo, and DC. Correlation analyses explored the relationship between local brain abnormalities and patient characteristics.

RESULTS

No significant differences in age and gender were found among the three groups, nor were there differences in education level, Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) and Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAMA) between the TLEIP and TLE groups. All the onset sites of patients with TLEIP were on the right. In addition to fear, other symptoms observed included nausea, palpitations, rising epigastric sensation, and dyspnea. There were no correlations between duration of IP and HAMA (p = 0.659). Moreover, all IP durations were <2 min and most <1 min. Compared to the HCs group, the ReHo value of the TLEIP group in the right middle frontal gyrus was significantly decreased (GRF correction, two-tailed, voxel level P < 0.005, cluster level P < 0.05). Compared to the HCs and TLE groups, the DC value of the TLEIP group in the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) was significantly increased (GRF correction, two-tailed, voxel level P < 0.005, cluster level P < 0.05). No regions showed any significant fALFF difference between HCs and TLE groups (GRF correction, two-tailed, voxel level P < 0.005, cluster level P < 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

This research describes local brain abnormalities in patients with TLE presenting as IP. These results will be preliminarily conducive to understand the seizure mechanism of IP in patients with TLE, find out the MRI neural markers, and to further explore the neurophysiological mechanisms of IP in patients with TLE.

Functional connectivity patterns of trait empathy are associated with age

Empathy is the capacity to feel and understand others' mental states. In some individuals, there is an imbalance between the affective and cognitive components of empathy, which can lead to deficits. This study investigated the functional connectivity of the anterior insula (AI) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which play key roles in empathy, in covariation with the affective and cognitive subscales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), as a function of age and sex, as an exploratory analysis. Seed-based functional connectivity analyses were performed on 33 healthy participants that were subdivided according to their age (16 adults and 17 adolescents) and sex (16 women and 17 men). Adolescents reported lower cognitive empathy than adults and men less affective empathy than women. The connectivity of the dmPFC and AI, in covariation with the cognitive and affective subscales of empathy, respectively, differed between adolescents and adults, but was similar in men and women. Adolescents had patterns of negative covariations between the regions of interest and many brain regions associated with the default-mode and salience networks. These findings support that lower self-report levels of empathy in certain individuals could be reflected in the functional connectivity patterns of the dmPFC and AI.

Electrophysiological Evidence of Impaired Cognitive Reappraisal in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment: An Event-related Potential Study

BACKGROUND

Emotion dysregulation symptoms are associated with higher conversion rates from MCI to dementia. Thus, understanding the neural mechanism underlying emotion regulation in people with MCI could provide useful information in early detection and intervention of MCI. This study investigated cognitive reappraisal, an emotion regulation strategy, in people with MCI using event-related potentials analysis.

METHODS

Late positive potential (LPP) was measured in 46 amnestic MCI subjects and 47 healthy elderly controls (HECs) as they viewed neutral and unpleasant images. All participants viewed a brief description of the upcoming image; neutral images were neutrally described (the Neut condition), and negative images were preceded with either more neutral/positive (the Rea condition) or more negative (the Neg condition) interpretations.

RESULTS

MCI subjects reduced their emotional intensity to a smaller extent than HEC subjects. For MCI subjects, the decreased level of emotional intensity was positively correlated with function in the verbal and executive domains. The reduced intensity (Rea - Neg) was also inversely correlated with the LPP difference (Rea - Neg) 3,600-5,000 ms after stimulus onset. Compared with HEC subjects, MCI subjects showed hypoactivation in the cuneus in the N2 time range (240-310 ms) and in the inferior parietal lobule and supramarginal gyrus in the 3,600-5,000 ms range.

CONCLUSION

These results suggest that MCI subjects failed to maintain the reappraisal of negative stimuli in the late time window, which contributed to a smaller success with reappraisal.

Neural basis of implicit cognitive reappraisal in panic disorder: an event-related fMRI study

Background

Panic disorder (PD) is thought to be related with deficits in emotion regulation, especially in cognitive reappraisal. According to the cognitive model, PD patients’ intrinsic and unconscious misappraisal strategies are the cause of panic attacks. However, no studies have yet been performed to explore the underlying neuromechanism of cognitive reappraisal that occur on an unconscious level in PD patients.

Methods

Twenty-six patients with PD and 25 healthy controls (HC) performed a fully-verified event-block design emotional regulation task aimed at investigating responses of implicit cognitive reappraisal during an fMRI scan. Participants passively viewed negatively valanced pictures that were beforehand neutrally, positively, or adversely portrayed in the task.

Results

Whole-brain analysis of fMRI data showed that PD patients exhibited less activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) compared to HC, but presented greater activation in parietal cortex when negative pictures were preceded by positive/neutral vs negative descriptions. Simultaneously, interactive effects of Group × Condition were observed in the right amygdala across both groups. Furthermore, activation in dlPFC and dmPFC was is negatively correlated to severity of anxiety and panic in PD when negative images were preceded by non-negative vs negative descriptions.

Conclusions

Emotional dysregulation in PD is likely the result of deficient activation in dlPFC and dmPFC during implicit cognitive reappraisal, in line with impaired automatic top-down regulation. Correlations between severity of anxiety and panic attack and activation of right dlPFC and dmPFC suggest that the failure to engage prefrontal region during implicit cognitive reappraisal might be associated wtih the severity of anxiety and panic; such functional patterns might be the target of possible treatments.

The impact of acute exercise on implicit cognitive reappraisal in association with left dorsolateral prefronta activation: A fNIRS study

Despite findings showing that acute exercise may help enhance emotion regulation, the neurophysiological mechanisms of these effects remain poorly understood. In this study, we examined whether acute exercise influences cognitive emotion regulation, and, in particular, an implicit cognitive reappraisal. Twenty sedentary young women were randomly assigned to either a control group (n = 10) or an exercise group (n = 10). Participants underwent an implicit cognitive reappraisal task twice, before and after the 30-min acute exercise or control, alongside functional near-infrared spectroscopy recordings (NIRS). The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and left orbital frontal cortex (OFC) were activated during implicit cognitive reappraisal at baseline, but only the left dlPFC activation was linked with behavioral performance. Acute exercise enhanced the activation of these regions, reflective of the partial neural bases of implicit cognitive reappraisal, in the left dlPFC and left OFC, but did not alter the behavioral performance. Results also showed that acute exercise moderated the positive effect of left dlPFC activation on implicit cognitive reappraisal performance; specifically, this effect was stronger in the exercise group. In conclusion, the enhanced activation of the left dlPFC by acute exercise and the increased link between behavioral performance and its neural indices may point to acute exercise as a promoter of implicit cognitive reappraisal.

Neural Mechanism of Affective Perception: Evidence from Phase and Causality Analysis in the Cerebral Cortex

Emotion plays an important role in people's lives. However, the neural mechanism of affective perception is still unclear. In this study, steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) were used to explore information processing speed and interactions among cortical structures involved in affective perception. Pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System were presented either in intact or phase-scrambled form at a fixed frequency, where the induced SSVEPs could be used as a frequency marker of brain activity with high temporal resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. Source estimation methods were used to reconstruct the cortical signals. The information processing of affective images was studied by phase and causal connection analysis in the cortical space to investigate the information processing speed of the local brain region and the dynamic interactions across brain regions. Experimental results showed that affective and semantic perception was accompanied by the acceleration of information processing speed in the ventral pathway. Unpleasant emotions had the fastest information processing speed in the ventral stream compared with pleasant and neutral emotions, including the middle occipital gyrus and the middle temporal gyrus, with a right hemisphere bias. In addition, unpleasant emotions were stronger than pleasant emotions in long-term causal connections in the bilateral middle temporal gyrus, and the direction was from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere. These results provide unique insights into the cortical activities for affective perception and support the view that unpleasant emotions have priority in information perception in the middle temporal gyrus compared with pleasant and neutral emotions, with a right hemisphere bias.

Gray Matter Density of the Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Mediates the Relationship Between Catastrophizing and Anxiety in Somatic Symptom Disorder

OBJECTIVE

Catastrophizing is commonly co-occurrence with anxiety in somatic symptom disorder (SSD). However, the quantitative relationship between catastrophizing and anxiety in SSD and its underlying neuropsychopathology remains unclear.

METHODS

To address the issue, twenty-eight SSD patients and twenty-nine healthy controls (HCs) completed the Hamilton anxiety scale and the catastrophizing subscale of the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire. Then they underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging and voxel-based morphometry analysis was performed to obtain gray matter density (GMD) of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC).

RESULTS

Independent samples t-tests showed no significance between SSD patients and HCs in the scores on the catastrophizing subscale and GMD of the dmPFC. However, correlation analysis found that catastrophizing was significantly positively associated with anxiety in SSD. Further, mediation analyses revealed that GMD of the dmPFC (bilateral medial Brodmann area 8) mediated the relationship between catastrophizing and anxiety in SSD.

CONCLUSION

These findings support Kirmayer's disease model of SSD that catastrophic interpretations of somatic symptoms resulted in increased anxiety and demonstrate that the dmPFC may be a potential neural site linking catastrophizing and anxiety in SSD.

Progressive brain structural alterations assessed via causal analysis in patients with generalized anxiety disorder

Accumulating neuroimaging studies implicate widespread brain structural alterations in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), but little is known regarding the temporal information of these changes and their causal relationships. In this study, a morphometric analysis was performed on T1-weighted structural images, and the progressive changes in the gray matter volume (GMV) in GAD were simulated by dividing the patients into different groups from low illness duration to high illness duration. The duration was defined as the interval between the onset of GAD and the time for magnetic resonance imaging collection. Then, a causal structural covariance network analysis was conducted to describe the causal relationships of the brain structural alterations in GAD. With increased illness duration, the GMV reduction in GAD originated from the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) and propagated to the bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex, right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, left inferior temporal gyrus, and right insula. Intriguingly, the sgACC and the right insula had positive causal effects on each other. Moreover, both sgACC and right insula exhibited positive causal effects on the parietal cortex and negative effects on the posterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, visual cortex, and temporal lobe. The opposite causal effects were noted on the somatosensory and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortices. In conclusion, patients with GAD show gradual GMV reduction with increasing ilness duration. Furthermore, the causal effects of the sgACC and the right insula GMV reduction with shifts of duration may provide an important new avenue for understanding the pathological anomalies in GAD.

Temporal dynamics of error-related corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major activity: Evidence for implicit emotion regulation following errors

According to feedback control models, errors are monitored and inform subsequent control adaptations. Despite these cognitive consequences, errors also have affective consequences. It has been suggested that errors elicit negative affect which might be functional for control adaptations. The present research is concerned with the temporal dynamics of error-related affect. Therefore, we ask how affective responses to errors change over time. Two experiments assessed performance in a Stroop-like task in combination with online measures of facial electromyography that index affective responses specific for muscles that are associated with the expression of negative (corrugator supercilii) and positive affect (zygomaticus major). After errors, corrugator activity first increased relative to correct trials but then decreased (below correct trials) for later time bins. Zygomaticus activity showed a concomitant inverse pattern following errors, such that an initial decrease was followed by a later increase relative to correct trials. Together, this biphasic response in both facial muscles suggests that early negative responses to errors turn into increasingly more positive ones over time. Error-triggered electromyography did marginally predict behavioral adjustments following errors at the inter-individual, but not at the intra-individual level, providing only limited evidence for a functional role of error-related affect for immediate changes in behavior. However, the dynamics of error-related electromyography points to the role of implicit emotion regulation during task performance. We propose that this process helps to maintain homeostasis of positive and negative affect which in the long term could facilitate adaptive behavior.

Negative views of out-groups and emotion regulation strategies: Evidence for an association with the tendency to suppress emotion expression, but not with cognitive reappraisal or emotion dysregulation

Emotions influence attitudes and appraisals toward out-groups, including prejudice. We hypothesized that individuals who successfully regulate emotions will express more positive attitudes toward out-groups. We conducted an online study of associations between emotion regulation and attitudes toward out-groups in a Finnish population-based sample (N = 320). As hypothesized, expressive suppression was associated with decreased acceptance toward out-groups, but contrary to our hypothesis, cognitive reappraisal was not associated with increased acceptance. In exploratory analyses, we found that individuals with more cognitive reappraisal (vs. expressive suppression) had a higher acceptance of out-groups, and that emotion regulation may not influence attitudes toward all out-groups equally. In conclusion, we present novel results indicating that habitual emotion regulation strategies are differently associated with attitudes toward a broad array of out-groups, and that the sociocultural aspects of emotion regulation toward out-group attitudes may play a role.

Inhibitory control of emotional processing: Theoretical and empirical considerations

Although inhibitory control appears to support successful emotion regulation (ER; Joorman and Gotlib, 2010; McCabe et al., 2010), few emotion inhibition studies position themselves in the literature on ER, and even fewer ER studies reference the role of emotion inhibition. Perhaps contributing to this, the ER literature is frequently divided into implicit or "automatic" (which subsumes emotion inhibition) and explicit or "effortful" control (Braunstein et al., 2017; Gyurak et al., 2011). The present paper evaluates relationships among constructs of inhibitory control, emotion inhibition, and ER to assess neural evidence for and against distinctions between implicit and explicit ER. We argue that, whereas the distinction between implicit and explicit ER may appear organizationally or conceptually helpful, such categorical distinctions are not supported by available research and in fact contribute to imbalances in the research literature.

Does Meditation Alter Brain Responses to Negative Stimuli? A Systematic Review

Background: Despite several attempts to review and explain how meditation alters the brain and facilitates emotion regulation, the extent to which meditation and emotion regulation strategies share the same neural mechanisms remains unclear.

Objective: We aim to understand the influence of meditation on the neural processing of negative emotional stimuli in participants who underwent meditation interventions (naive meditators) and long-term meditators.

Methodology: A systematic review was conducted using standardized search operators that included the presence of terms related to emotion, meditation and neuro-imaging techniques in PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases.

Results: Searches identified 882 papers, of which 11 were eligible for inclusion. Results showed a predominance of greater prefrontal/frontal activity related to meditation, which might indicate the increased recruitment of cognitive/attentional control resources in naïve and long-term meditators. This increased frontal activity was also observed when participants were asked to simply react to negative stimuli. Findings from emotion-related areas were scarce but suggested increased insular activity in meditators, potentially indicating that meditation might be associated with greater bodily awareness.

Conclusions: Meditation practice prompts regulatory mechanisms when participants face aversive stimuli, even without an explicit request. Moreover, some studies reported increased insular activity in meditators, consistent with the hypothesis that meditation helps foster an interoceptive awareness of bodily and emotional states.

Prefrontoparietal dysfunction during emotion regulation in anxiety disorder: a meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies

OBJECTIVE

Impairments in emotion regulation, and more specifically in cognitive reappraisal, are thought to play a key role in the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. However, the available evidence on such deficits is inconsistent. To further illustrate the neurobiological underpinnings of anxiety disorder, the present meta-analysis summarizes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings for cognitive reappraisal tasks and investigates related brain areas.

METHODS

We performed a comprehensive series of meta-analyses of cognitive reappraisal fMRI studies contrasting patients with anxiety disorder with healthy control (HC) subjects, employing an anisotropic effect-size signed differential mapping approach. We also conducted a subgroup analysis of medication status, anxiety disorder subtype, data-processing software, and MRI field strengths. Meta-regression was used to explore the effects of demographics and clinical characteristics. Eight studies, with 11 datasets including 219 patients with anxiety disorder and 227 HC, were identified.

RESULTS

Compared with HC, patients with anxiety disorder showed relatively decreased activation of the bilateral dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), bilateral supplementary motor area (SMA), left ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), bilateral parietal cortex, and left fusiform gyrus during cognitive reappraisal. The subgroup analysis, jackknife sensitivity analysis, heterogeneity analysis, and Egger's tests further confirmed these findings.

CONCLUSIONS

Impaired cognitive reappraisal in anxiety disorder may be the consequence of hypo-activation of the prefrontoparietal network, consistent with insufficient top-down control. Our findings provide robust evidence that functional impairment in prefrontoparietal neuronal circuits may have a significant role in the pathogenesis of anxiety disorder.