Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5797, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2012 Mar;7(3):322-31. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsr014. Epub 2011 May 23.
Individuals with low self-esteem have been found to react more negatively to signs of interpersonal rejection than those with high self-esteem. However, previous research has found that individual differences in attentional control can attenuate negative reactions to social rejection among vulnerable, low self-esteem individuals. The current fMRI study sought to elucidate the neurobiological substrate of this buffering effect. We hypothesized and found that while looking at scenes of social rejection (vs negative scenes) low self-esteem high attentional control individuals engaged the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), an area of the brain associated with emotional control, more than their low self-esteem low attentional control peers. Furthermore, we found that low self-esteem high attentional control individuals evaluated social rejection as less arousing and less rejecting in a separate behavioral task. Importantly, activation in the rACC fully mediated the relationship between the interaction of self-esteem and attentional control and emotional evaluations, suggesting that the rACC activation underlies the buffering effects of attentional control. Results are discussed in terms of individual differences in emotional vulnerability and protection and by highlighting the role of rACC in emotion regulation.
研究发现，与自尊心高的人相比，自尊心低的人对人际拒绝的迹象反应更为消极。然而，先前的研究发现，注意力控制的个体差异可以减轻脆弱的低自尊心个体对社会拒绝的负面反应。本 fMRI 研究旨在阐明这种缓冲效应的神经生物学基础。我们假设并发现，当低自尊心高注意力控制个体（与低自尊心低注意力控制个体相比）观察社会拒绝场景（与负面场景相比）时，他们的大脑前扣带皮层（rACC）更为活跃，rACC 是与情绪控制相关的大脑区域。此外，我们发现，在一项单独的行为任务中，低自尊心高注意力控制个体将社会拒绝评价为不那么令人激动和不那么具有排斥性。重要的是，rACC 的激活完全介导了自尊和注意力控制与情绪评估之间相互作用的关系，这表明 rACC 的激活是注意力控制缓冲效应的基础。研究结果从情绪脆弱性和保护的个体差异方面进行了讨论，并强调了 rACC 在情绪调节中的作用。
