Department of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany.
Cereb Cortex. 2011 Jun;21(6):1379-88. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhq216. Epub 2010 Nov 1.
The regulation of emotion is vital for adaptive behavior in a social environment. Different strategies may be adopted to achieve successful emotion regulation, ranging from attentional control (e.g., distraction) to cognitive change (e.g., reappraisal). However, there is only scarce evidence comparing the different regulation strategies with respect to their neural mechanisms and their effects on emotional experience. We, therefore, directly compared reappraisal and distraction in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with emotional pictures. In the distraction condition participants performed an arithmetic task, while they reinterpreted the emotional situation during reappraisal to downregulate emotional intensity. Both strategies were successful in reducing subjective emotional state ratings and lowered activity in the bilateral amygdala. Direct contrasts, however, showed a stronger decrease in amygdala activity for distraction when compared with reappraisal. While both strategies relied on common control areas in the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior parietal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex was selectively activated for reappraisal. In contrast, the dorsal anterior cingulate and large clusters in the parietal cortex were active in the distraction condition. Functional connectivity patterns of the amygdala activation confirmed the roles of these specific activations for the 2 emotion regulation strategies.
情绪调节对于在社会环境中进行适应性行为至关重要。可以采用不同的策略来实现成功的情绪调节，从注意力控制（例如分心）到认知改变（例如重新评价）。然而，关于不同调节策略的神经机制及其对情绪体验的影响，只有很少的证据进行比较。因此，我们在一项功能性磁共振成像研究中直接比较了情绪图片的再评价和分心。在分心条件下，参与者执行算术任务，同时在重新评价期间重新解释情绪情况以降低情绪强度。两种策略都成功地降低了主观情绪状态评分，并降低了双侧杏仁核的活动。然而，直接对比显示，分心时杏仁核活动的下降幅度大于再评价。虽然两种策略都依赖于内侧和背外侧前额叶和下顶叶皮层的共同控制区域，但眶额皮层仅在再评价时被激活。相比之下，背侧前扣带和顶叶皮层中的大簇在分心条件下活跃。杏仁核激活的功能连接模式证实了这些特定激活在 2 种情绪调节策略中的作用。
