Test-retest reliability of voluntary emotion regulation

Semi-Natural and Spontaneous Speech Recognition Using Deep Neural Networks with Hybrid Features Unification

Recently, identifying speech emotions in a spontaneous database has been a complex and demanding study area. This research presents an entirely new approach for recognizing semi-natural and spontaneous speech emotions with multiple feature fusion and deep neural networks (DNN). A proposed framework extracts the most discriminative features from hybrid acoustic feature sets. However, these feature sets may contain duplicate and irrelevant information, leading to inadequate emotional identification. Therefore, an support vector machine (SVM) algorithm is utilized to identify the most discriminative audio feature map after obtaining the relevant features learned by the fusion approach. We investigated our approach utilizing the eNTERFACE05 and BAUM-1s benchmark databases and observed a significant identification accuracy of 76% for a speaker-independent experiment with SVM and 59% accuracy with, respectively. Furthermore, experiments on the eNTERFACE05 and BAUM-1s dataset indicate that the suggested framework outperformed current state-of-the-art techniques on the semi-natural and spontaneous datasets.

Psychophysiological Effects of Downregulating Negative Emotions: Insights From a Meta-Analysis of Healthy Adults

Assessing psychophysiological responses of emotion regulation is a cost-efficient way to quantify emotion regulation and to complement subjective report that may be biased. Previous studies have revealed inconsistent results complicating a sound interpretation of these findings. In the present study, we summarized the existing literature through a systematic search of articles. Meta-analyses were used to evaluate effect sizes of instructed downregulation strategies on common autonomic (electrodermal, respiratory, cardiovascular, and pupillometric) and electromyographic (corrugator activity, emotion-modulated startle) measures. Moderator analyses were conducted, with moderators including study design, emotion induction, control instruction and trial duration. We identified k = 78 studies each contributing multiple sub-samples and performed 23 meta-analyses for combinations of emotion regulation strategy and psychophysiological measure. Overall, results showed that effects of reappraisal and suppression on autonomic measures were highly inconsistent across studies with rather small mean effect sizes. Electromyography (startle and corrugator activity) showed medium effect sizes that were consistent across studies. Our findings highlight the diversity as well as the low level of standardization and comparability of research in this area. Significant moderation of effects by study design, trial duration, and control condition emphasizes the need for better standardization of methods. In addition, the small mean effect sizes resulting from our analyses on autonomic measures should be interpreted with caution. Findings corroborate the importance of multi-channel approaches.

Higher resting-state BNST-CeA connectivity is associated with greater corrugator supercilii reactivity to negatively valenced images

The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) are hypothesized to be the output nodes of the extended amygdala threat response, integrating multiple signals to coordinate the threat response via outputs to the hypothalamus and brainstem. The BNST and CeA are structurally and functionally connected, suggesting interactions between these regions may regulate how the response to provocation unfolds. However, the relationship between human BNST-CeA connectivity and the behavioral response to affective stimuli is little understood. To investigate whether individual differences in BNST-CeA connectivity are related to the affective response to negatively valenced stimuli, we tested relations between resting-state BNST-CeA connectivity and both facial electromyographic (EMG) activity of the corrugator supercilii muscle and eyeblink startle magnitude during affective image presentation within the Refresher sample of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study. We found that higher right BNST-CeA connectivity was associated with greater corrugator activity to negative, but not positive, images. There was a trend-level association between right BNST-CeA connectivity and trait negative affect. Eyeblink startle magnitude was not significantly related to BNST-CeA connectivity. These results suggest that functional interactions between BNST and CeA contribute to the behavioral response to negative emotional events.

Speech Emotion Recognition with Heterogeneous Feature Unification of Deep Neural Network

Automatic speech emotion recognition is a challenging task due to the gap between acoustic features and human emotions, which rely strongly on the discriminative acoustic features extracted for a given recognition task. We propose a novel deep neural architecture to extract the informative feature representations from the heterogeneous acoustic feature groups which may contain redundant and unrelated information leading to low emotion recognition performance in this work. After obtaining the informative features, a fusion network is trained to jointly learn the discriminative acoustic feature representation and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as the final classifier for recognition task. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP dataset demonstrate that the proposed architecture improved the recognition performance, achieving accuracy of 64% compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Feature Extraction and Selection for Pain Recognition Using Peripheral Physiological Signals

In pattern recognition, the selection of appropriate features is paramount to both the performance and the robustness of the system. Over-reliance on machine learning-based feature selection methods can, therefore, be problematic; especially when conducted using small snapshots of data. The results of these methods, if adopted without proper interpretation, can lead to sub-optimal system design or worse, the abandonment of otherwise viable and important features. In this work, a deep exploration of pain-based emotion classification was conducted to better understand differences in the results of the related literature. In total, 155 different time domain and frequency domain features were explored, derived from electromyogram (EMG), skin conductance levels (SCL), and electrocardiogram (ECG) readings taken from the 85 subjects in response to heat-induced pain. To address the inconsistency in the optimal feature sets found in related works, an exhaustive and interpretable feature selection protocol was followed to obtain a generalizable feature set. Associations between features were then visualized using a topologically-informed chart, called Mapper, of this physiological feature space, including synthesis and comparison of results from previous literature. This topological feature chart was able to identify key sources of information that led to the formation of five main functional feature groups: signal amplitude and power, frequency information, nonlinear complexity, unique, and connecting. These functional groupings were used to extract further insight into observable autonomic responses to pain through a complementary statistical interaction analysis. From this chart, it was observed that EMG and SCL derived features could functionally replace those obtained from ECG. These insights motivate future work on novel sensing modalities, feature design, deep learning approaches, and dimensionality reduction techniques.

Visual Attention to Suffering After Compassion Training Is Associated With Decreased Amygdala Responses

Compassion meditation training is hypothesized to increase the motivational salience of cues of suffering, while also enhancing equanimous attention and decreasing emotional reactivity to suffering. However, it is currently unknown how compassion meditation impacts visual attention to suffering, and how this impacts neural activation in regions associated with motivational salience as well as aversive responses, such as the amygdala. Healthy adults were randomized to 2 weeks of compassion or reappraisal training. We measured BOLD fMRI responses before and after training while participants actively engaged in their assigned training to images depicting human suffering or non-suffering. Eye-tracking data were recorded concurrently, and we computed looking time for socially and emotionally evocative areas of the images, and calculated visual preference for suffering vs. non-suffering. Increases in visual preference for suffering due to compassion training were associated with decreases in the amygdala, a brain region involved in negative valence, arousal, and physiological responses typical of fear and anxiety states. This pattern was specifically in the compassion group, and was not found in the reappraisal group. In addition, compassion training-related increases in visual preference for suffering were also associated with decreases in regions sensitive to valence and empathic distress, spanning the anterior insula and orbitofrontal cortex (while the reappraisal group showed the opposite effect). Examining visual attention alone demonstrated that engaging in compassion in general (across both time points) resulted in visual attention preference for suffering compared to engaging in reappraisal. Collectively, these findings suggest that compassion meditation may cultivate visual preference for suffering while attenuating neural responses in regions typically associated with aversive processing of negative stimuli, which may cultivate a more equanimous and nonreactive form of attention to stimuli of suffering.

Emotional reactivity and regulation in individuals with psychopathic traits: Evidence for a disconnect between neurophysiology and self-report

Individuals with psychopathic traits often demonstrate blunted reactivity to negative emotional stimuli. However, it is not yet clear whether these individuals also have difficulty regulating their emotional responses to negative stimuli. To address this question, participants with varying levels of psychopathic traits (indexed by the Triarchic Measure of Psychopathy; Patrick, 2010) completed a task in which they passively viewed, increased, or decreased their emotions to negative picture stimuli while electrocortical activity was recorded. During passive viewing of negative images, higher boldness, but not higher disinhibition or meanness, was associated with reduced amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP), an ERP that indexes reactivity to emotionally relevant stimuli. However, all participants demonstrated expected enhancement of the LPP when asked to increase their emotional response. Participants did not show expected suppression of the LPP when asked to decrease their emotional response. Contrary to the electrophysiological data, individuals with higher boldness did not self-report experiencing blunted emotional response during passive viewing trials, and they reported experiencing greater emotional reactivity relative to other participants when regulating (e.g., both increasing and decreasing) their emotions. Results suggest inconsistency between physiological and self-report indices of emotion among high-bold individuals during both affective processing and regulation.

Recognition of emotions using multimodal physiological signals and an ensemble deep learning model

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Using deep-learning methodologies to analyze multimodal physiological signals becomes increasingly attractive for recognizing human emotions. However, the conventional deep emotion classifiers may suffer from the drawback of the lack of the expertise for determining model structure and the oversimplification of combining multimodal feature abstractions.

METHODS

In this study, a multiple-fusion-layer based ensemble classifier of stacked autoencoder (MESAE) is proposed for recognizing emotions, in which the deep structure is identified based on a physiological-data-driven approach. Each SAE consists of three hidden layers to filter the unwanted noise in the physiological features and derives the stable feature representations. An additional deep model is used to achieve the SAE ensembles. The physiological features are split into several subsets according to different feature extraction approaches with each subset separately encoded by a SAE. The derived SAE abstractions are combined according to the physiological modality to create six sets of encodings, which are then fed to a three-layer, adjacent-graph-based network for feature fusion. The fused features are used to recognize binary arousal or valence states.

RESULTS

DEAP multimodal database was employed to validate the performance of the MESAE. By comparing with the best existing emotion classifier, the mean of classification rate and F-score improves by 5.26%.

CONCLUSIONS

The superiority of the MESAE against the state-of-the-art shallow and deep emotion classifiers has been demonstrated under different sizes of the available physiological instances.

Psychometric properties of startle and corrugator response in NPU, affective picture viewing, and resting state tasks

The current study provides a comprehensive evaluation of critical psychometric properties of commonly used psychophysiology laboratory tasks/measures within the NIMH RDoC. Participants (N = 128) completed the no-shock, predictable shock, unpredictable shock (NPU) task, affective picture viewing task, and resting state task at two study visits separated by 1 week. We examined potentiation/modulation scores in NPU (predictable or unpredictable shock vs. no-shock) and affective picture viewing tasks (pleasant or unpleasant vs. neutral pictures) for startle and corrugator responses with two commonly used quantification methods. We quantified startle potentiation/modulation scores with raw and standardized responses. We quantified corrugator potentiation/modulation in the time and frequency domains. We quantified general startle reactivity in the resting state task as the mean raw startle response during the task. For these three tasks, two measures, and two quantification methods, we evaluated effect size robustness and stability, internal consistency (i.e., split-half reliability), and 1-week temporal stability. The psychometric properties of startle potentiation in the NPU task were good, but concerns were noted for corrugator potentiation in this task. Some concerns also were noted for the psychometric properties of both startle and corrugator modulation in the affective picture viewing task, in particular, for pleasant picture modulation. Psychometric properties of general startle reactivity in the resting state task were good. Some salient differences in the psychometric properties of the NPU and affective picture viewing tasks were observed within and across quantification methods.

Reliable emotion recognition system based on dynamic adaptive fusion of forehead biopotentials and physiological signals

In this study, we proposed a new adaptive method for fusing multiple emotional modalities to improve the performance of the emotion recognition system. Three-channel forehead biosignals along with peripheral physiological measurements (blood volume pressure, skin conductance, and interbeat intervals) were utilized as emotional modalities. Six basic emotions, i.e., anger, sadness, fear, disgust, happiness, and surprise were elicited by displaying preselected video clips for each of the 25 participants in the experiment; the physiological signals were collected simultaneously. In our multimodal emotion recognition system, recorded signals with the formation of several classification units identified the emotions independently. Then the results were fused using the adaptive weighted linear model to produce the final result. Each classification unit is assigned a weight that is determined dynamically by considering the performance of the units during the testing phase and the training phase results. This dynamic weighting scheme enables the emotion recognition system to adapt itself to each new user. The results showed that the suggested method outperformed conventional fusion of the features and classification units using the majority voting method. In addition, a considerable improvement, compared to the systems that used the static weighting schemes for fusing classification units, was also shown. Using support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) classifiers, the overall classification accuracies of 84.7% and 80% were obtained in identifying the emotions, respectively. In addition, applying the forehead or physiological signals in the proposed scheme indicates that designing a reliable emotion recognition system is feasible without the need for additional emotional modalities.

Predicting the future in schizophrenia: The discrepancy between anticipatory and consummatory pleasure

When predicting future emotions we use inaccurate biases which rely on our most salient and recent experiences. In schizophrenia, there appears to be a specific deficit in this anticipatory process which is associated with reduced motivation and engagement. The nature of this deficit and how it differs to the general population is unclear. This study introduces a new task examining the discrepancy between anticipated and experienced pleasure and investigates its potential usefulness to characterise the pleasure deficit in people with schizophrenia. Forty-eight healthy controls and 50 individuals with schizophrenia completed the Components of Pleasure Task (COP) which uses a range of images to generate anticipatory and experiential ratings. Participants also completed measures of mood and symptoms. Individuals with schizophrenia had a larger anticipatory-consummatory discrepancy score. This was due to under-anticipating highly pleasant stimuli and over-anticipating low pleasantness stimuli. People with schizophrenia are blunted compared to controls when anticipating stimuli, considering highly and lowly rated stimuli alike. A greater discrepancy between anticipated and experienced pleasure may contribute to negative symptoms such as poor motivation and social withdrawal. Reducing the discrepancy between experienced and anticipated pleasure may be a target for interventions aiming to reduce negative symptoms.

Emotion regulation of the affect-modulated startle reflex during different picture categories

Previous studies on emotion regulation of the startle reflex found an increase in startle amplitude from down-, to non-, to up-regulation for pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. We wanted to clarify whether this regulation effect remains stable for different picture categories within pleasant and unpleasant picture sets. We assessed startle amplitude of 31 participants during down-, non-, or up-regulation of feelings elicited by pleasant erotic and adventure and unpleasant victim and threat pictures. Startle amplitude was smaller during adventure and erotic compared to victim and threat pictures and increased from down-, to non-, to up-regulation independently of the picture category. Results indicate that the motivational priming effect on startle modulation elicited by different picture categories is independent of emotion regulation instructions. In addition, the emotion regulation effect is independent of motivational priming effects.

Subtypes of anhedonia and facial electromyography response to negative affective pictures in non-psychiatric adults

INTRODUCTION

Flat/constricted affect and anhedonia are symptoms found in several psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. However, there are very few studies on the relationships between specific anhedonia subtypes and objectively assessed flat affect, and it appears that none of the existing studies examined potential moderation by sex.

METHODS

Forty-seven undergraduate students (60% male) completed self-report questionnaires assessing three subtypes of anhedonia - non-social consummatory (CON) and anticipatory (ANT) anhedonia, and overall social anhedonia. Participants viewed 15 pictures (5 neutral and 10 negative) from the International Affective Picture System, whereas facial muscle reaction was recorded using electromyography (EMG).

RESULTS

Male participants reporting a greater level of overall social or non-social CON anhedonia showed a greater EMG activity increase in the corrugator supercilii muscle to negative (vs. neutral) pictures. In females, the relationship was only found with social anhedonia and was opposite in direction, as increased social anhedonia related to less EMG activity change in the corrugator muscle.

CONCLUSIONS

The relationship between anhedonia and flat affect varied as a function of sex and anhedonia subtype. These findings may help explain discrepancies in the sparse existing literature examining this relationship in psychiatric populations and have implications for assessment and treatment of these symptoms across psychiatric disorders.

Spontaneous emotion regulation: differential effects on evoked brain potentials and facial muscle activity

Late positive potentials (LPPs) were found to be decreased during down-regulation and increased during up-regulation of positive and negative emotions. However, previous studies lack ecological validity, since they explicitly instructed their participants to use certain regulation strategies. The goal of our study was to test an ecologically more valid paradigm of emotion regulation. We therefore investigated the effects of freely chosen emotion regulation strategies on LPPs and additionally assessed facial EMG responses and valence and arousal ratings as control variables. Responses to positive IAPS pictures were marked by pleasant valence ratings and high activations of M. zygomaticus major, negative pictures elicited unpleasant valence ratings and high activations of M. corrugator supercilii, and both, positive and negative pictures, went along with increased arousal ratings and LPPs. Importantly, ratings and EMG activity were intensified through up-regulation and attenuated through down-regulation of emotions, while LPPs were increased through both up-and down-regulation. We conclude that LPPs in paradigms with free choice of emotion regulation strategies might be a marker of attentional resources required for the selection of adequate emotion up- and down-regulation strategies, while LPP effects following emotion regulation with specific, instructed strategies reflect modulated arousal processes.

The neurobiology of emotion-cognition interactions: fundamental questions and strategies for future research

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of powerful new tools for assaying the brain and a remarkable acceleration of research focused on the interplay of emotion and cognition. This work has begun to yield new insights into fundamental questions about the nature of the mind and important clues about the origins of mental illness. In particular, this research demonstrates that stress, anxiety, and other kinds of emotion can profoundly influence key elements of cognition, including selective attention, working memory, and cognitive control. Often, this influence persists beyond the duration of transient emotional challenges, partially reflecting the slower molecular dynamics of catecholamine and hormonal neurochemistry. In turn, circuits involved in attention, executive control, and working memory contribute to the regulation of emotion. The distinction between the 'emotional' and the 'cognitive' brain is fuzzy and context-dependent. Indeed, there is compelling evidence that brain territories and psychological processes commonly associated with cognition, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and working memory, play a central role in emotion. Furthermore, putatively emotional and cognitive regions influence one another via a complex web of connections in ways that jointly contribute to adaptive and maladaptive behavior. This work demonstrates that emotion and cognition are deeply interwoven in the fabric of the brain, suggesting that widely held beliefs about the key constituents of 'the emotional brain' and 'the cognitive brain' are fundamentally flawed. We conclude by outlining several strategies for enhancing future research. Developing a deeper understanding of the emotional-cognitive brain is important, not just for understanding the mind but also for elucidating the root causes of its disorders.

Genetic psychophysiology: advances, problems, and future directions

This paper presents an overview of historical advances and the current state of genetic psychophysiology, a rapidly developing interdisciplinary research linking genetics, brain, and human behavior, discusses methodological problems, and outlines future directions of research. The main goals of genetic psychophysiology are to elucidate the neural pathways and mechanisms mediating genetic influences on cognition and emotion, identify intermediate brain-based phenotypes for psychopathology, and provide a functional characterization of genes being discovered by large association studies of behavioral phenotypes. Since the initiation of this neurogenetic approach to human individual differences in the 1970s, numerous twin and family studies have provided strong evidence for heritability of diverse aspects of brain function including resting-state brain oscillations, functional connectivity, and event-related neural activity in a variety of cognitive and emotion processing tasks, as well as peripheral psychophysiological responses. These data indicate large differences in the presence and strength of genetic influences across measures and domains, permitting the selection of heritable characteristics for gene finding studies. More recently, candidate gene association studies began to implicate specific genetic variants in different aspects of neurocognition. However, great caution is needed in pursuing this line of research due to its demonstrated proneness to generate false-positive findings. Recent developments in methods for physiological signal analysis, hemodynamic imaging, and genomic technologies offer new exciting opportunities for the investigation of the interplay between genetic and environmental factors in the development of individual differences in behavior, both normal and abnormal.

The face of negative affect: trial-by-trial corrugator responses to negative pictures are positively associated with amygdala and negatively associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity

The ability to simultaneously acquire objective physiological measures of emotion concurrent with fMRI holds the promise to enhance our understanding of the biological bases of affect and thus improve our knowledge of the neural circuitry underlying psychiatric disorders. However, the vast majority of neuroimaging studies to date examining emotion have not anchored the examination of emotion-responding circuitry to objective measures of emotional processing. To that end, we acquired EMG activity of a valence-sensitive facial muscle involved in the frowning response (corrugator muscle) concurrent with fMRI while twenty-six human participants viewed negative and neutral images. Trial-by-trial increases in corrugator EMG activity to negative pictures were associated with greater amygdala activity and a concurrent decrease in ventromedial PFC activity. Thus, this study highlights the reciprocal relation between amygdalar and ventromedial PFC in the encoding of emotional valence as reflected by facial expression.

Prolonged marital stress is associated with short-lived responses to positive stimuli

Marital stress is associated with a higher incidence of psychiatric disorders, in particular major depression. One pathway through which marital stress may impact emotional health is by compromising emotion-responding processes. We examined a longitudinal sample of adults (N = 116; 59 males; 39-84 years) to verify how marital stress predicts reactivity to, and recovery from, emotional provocation. Individuals watched positive, neutral, and negative pictures while an objective measure of affective state, corrugator supercilii muscle activity, was recorded continuously. Our results indicate that marital stress is associated with short-lived responses to positive pictures, indexed by a less persistent decrease in corrugator activity after picture offset. Extending beyond the prior focus on negative emotional processes, these results suggest that social stress may impact health by influencing the time course of responding to positive events.

A healthcare edition of sporting equipment for middle-aged and elderly

The aging phenomenon results in body organ system debilitating, which causes the balance weakening and makes a fall, fracture rate, and further medical cost to increase. The lack of exercise has been linked to increasing the incidence of hypertension, coronary artery disease, osteoporosis, degenerative arthritis, and diabetes. Chronic disease affects patients both in psychological and physiological functions which limit their daily activity. In the past, many researches pointed out that these patients can improve their balance sensation by exercise. Because of the above reasons, this research implementation forms a wireless platform of information connection system and medical data analysis. First of all, the target population in the society focuses on those elderly with the common chronic diseases, such as skeletal muscle diseases and degenerative arthritis. Using the hydraulic resist practicing equipment as the mainstay intervention can help examinee collecting the practice value and further analysis. The platform of information accords not only the data prior and after the exercise but also graphic data presentation and analysis from the medical staff members providing services in the society. It can also provide the medical unit to create data mold and a body health counselor when services in the society.

Time course of emotion-related responding during distraction and reappraisal

Theoretical accounts of emotion regulation (ER) discriminate various cognitive strategies to voluntarily modify emotional states. Amongst these, attentional deployment (i.e. distraction) and cognitive change (i.e. reappraisal), have been shown to successfully down-regulate emotions. Neuroimaging studies found that both strategies differentially engage neural structures associated with selective attention, working memory and cognitive control. The aim of this study was to further delineate similarities and differences between the ER strategies reappraisal and distraction by investigating their temporal brain dynamics using event-related potentials (ERPs) and their patterns of facial expressive behavior. Twenty-one participants completed an ER experiment in which they had to either passively view positive, neutral and negative pictures, reinterpret them to down-regulate affective responses (reappraisal), or solve a concurrently presented mathematical equation (distraction). Results demonstrate the efficacy of both strategies in the subjective control of emotion, accompanied by reductions of facial expressive activity (Corrugator supercilii and Zygomaticus major). ERP results indicated that distraction, compared with reappraisal, yielded a stronger and earlier attenuation of the late positive potential (LPP) magnitude for negative pictures. For positive pictures, only distraction but not reappraisal had significant effect on LPP attenuation. The results support the process model of ER, separating subtypes of cognitive strategies based on their specific time course.

Conscientiousness predicts greater recovery from negative emotion

Greater levels of conscientiousness have been associated with lower levels of negative affect. We focus on one mechanism through which conscientiousness may decrease negative affect: effective emotion regulation, as reflected by greater recovery from negative stimuli. In 273 adults who were 35-85 years old, we collected self-report measures of personality including conscientiousness and its self-control facet, followed on average 2 years later by psychophysiological measures of emotional reactivity and recovery. Among middle-aged adults (35-65 years old), the measures of conscientiousness and self-control predicted greater recovery from, but not reactivity to, negative emotional stimuli. The effect of conscientiousness and self-control on recovery was not driven by other personality variables or by greater task adherence on the part of high conscientiousness individuals. In addition, the effect was specific to negative emotional stimuli and did not hold for neutral or positive emotional stimuli.

Amygdala-prefrontal coupling underlies individual differences in emotion regulation

Despite growing evidence on the neural bases of emotion regulation, little is known about the mechanisms underlying individual differences in cognitive regulation of negative emotion, and few studies have used objective measures to quantify regulatory success. Using a trait-like psychophysiological measure of emotion regulation, corrugator electromyography, we obtained an objective index of the ability to cognitively reappraise negative emotion in 56 healthy men (Session 1), who returned 1.3 years later to perform the same regulation task using fMRI (Session 2). Results indicated that the corrugator measure of regulatory skill predicted amygdala-prefrontal functional connectivity. Individuals with greater ability to down-regulate negative emotion as indexed by corrugator at Session 1 showed not only greater amygdala attenuation but also greater inverse connectivity between the amygdala and several sectors of the prefrontal cortex while down-regulating negative emotion at Session 2. Our results demonstrate that individual differences in emotion regulation are stable over time and underscore the important role of amygdala-prefrontal coupling for successful regulation of negative emotion.

The effect of cognitive reappraisal on physiological reactivity and emotional memory

We investigated the effect of cognitive reappraisal on emotional arousal, facial expressivity and subsequent memory. Men and women viewed emotionally negative pictures while they attempted to either increase or decrease negative emotions elicited by the pictures, or to simply view the pictures. Neutral pictures were also presented with instructions to simply view the pictures. Concurrent changes in emotional arousal and valence were assessed with skin conductance responses (SCRs) and facial corrugator electromyographic responses (EMG), respectively. Picture memory was assessed with an immediate recall test and a delayed recognition test. Relative to simply viewing pictures, voluntary reappraisal to increase negative emotion generated greater facial corrugator EMG and SCR responses, and reappraisal to decrease negative emotion generated decreased corrugator EMG responses. Men showed enhanced recognition for pictures presented during the increase and decrease conditions, whereas women showed comparable recognition performance across all regulation conditions. The modulation of subsequent recognition memory associated with decreasing emotion was inversely associated with changes in physiological responses. Our results suggest that sex is an important factor to consider in determining how reappraisal-induced physiological changes are associated with subsequent changes in memory. These findings contribute to our understanding of how reappraising emotion exerts both immediate and enduring influences on physiological responses and subsequent memory.

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. Our 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.

Stress potentiates early and attenuates late stages of visual processing

Stress can fundamentally alter neural responses to incoming information. Recent research suggests that stress and anxiety shift the balance of attention away from a task-directed mode, governed by prefrontal cortex, to a sensory-vigilance mode, governed by the amygdala and other threat-sensitive regions. A key untested prediction of this framework is that stress exerts dissociable effects on different stages of information processing. This study exploited the temporal resolution afforded by event-related potentials to disentangle the impact of stress on vigilance, indexed by early perceptual activity, from its impact on task-directed cognition, indexed by later postperceptual activity in humans. Results indicated that threat of shock amplified stress, measured using retrospective ratings and concurrent facial electromyography. Stress also double-dissociated early sensory-specific processing from later task-directed processing of emotionally neutral stimuli: stress amplified N1 (184-236 ms) and attenuated P3 (316-488 ms) activity. This demonstrates that stress can have strikingly different consequences at different processing stages. Consistent with recent suggestions, stress amplified earlier extrastriate activity in a manner consistent with vigilance for threat (N1), but disrupted later activity associated with the evaluation of task-relevant information (P3). These results provide a novel basis for understanding how stress can modulate information processing in everyday life and stress-sensitive disorders.