Division of Mind and Brain Research, Department of Psychiatry & Psychotherapy, CCM, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
Division of Mind and Brain Research, Department of Psychiatry & Psychotherapy, CCM, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Charitéplatz 1, 10117 Berlin, Germany; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Psychology, Unter den Linden 6, 10999 Berlin, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2014 Nov 1;101:298-309. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.06.051. Epub 2014 Jun 30.
Emotions are an indispensable part of our mental life. The term emotion regulation refers to those processes that influence the generation, the experience and the expression of emotions. There is a great variety of strategies to regulate emotions efficiently, which are used in daily life and that have been investigated by cognitive neuroscience. Distraction guides attention to a secondary task. Reinterpretation, a variant of cognitive reappraisal, works by changing the meaning of an emotional stimulus. Detachment, another reappraisal strategy, refers to distancing oneself from an emotional stimulus, thereby reducing its personal relevance. Expressive Suppression modifies the behavioral or physiological response to an emotional stimulus. These four strategies are not equally effective in terms of emotion regulation success and have been shown to partly rely on different neuronal systems. Here, we compare for the first time the neural mechanisms of these typical strategies directly in a common functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm of downregulation of negative emotions. Our results indicate that three of those strategies (Detachment, Expressive Suppression and Distraction) conjointly increase brain activation in a right prefronto-parietal regulation network and significantly reduce activation of the left amygdala. Compared to the other regulation strategies, Reinterpretation specifically recruited a different control network comprising left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal gyrus and was not effective in downregulation of the amygdala. We conclude that Detachment, Distraction and Expressive Suppression recruit very similar emotion regulation networks, whereas Reinterpretation is associated with activation of a qualitatively different network, making this regulation strategy a special one. Notably, Reinterpretation also proved to be the least effective strategy in neural terms, as measured by downregulation of amygdala activation.
情绪是我们精神生活中不可或缺的一部分。情绪调节是指影响情绪产生、体验和表达的那些过程。在日常生活中，我们会使用各种有效的策略来调节情绪，认知神经科学也对这些策略进行了研究。分心会将注意力引导到次要任务上。重新解释是认知重评的一种变体，通过改变情绪刺激的意义来发挥作用。另一种重评策略是疏离，指的是与情绪刺激保持距离，从而降低其个人相关性。表达抑制会改变对情绪刺激的行为或生理反应。这四种策略在情绪调节效果方面并不完全有效，并且已经表明它们部分依赖于不同的神经元系统。在这里，我们首次在一个共同的负性情绪下调功能磁共振成像（fMRI）范式中直接比较了这些典型策略的神经机制。我们的结果表明，这四种策略中的三种（疏离、表达抑制和分心）共同增加了右额顶叶调节网络的大脑激活，并且显著降低了左杏仁核的激活。与其他调节策略相比，重新解释特别招募了一个不同的控制网络，包括左外侧前额叶皮层和眶额回，并且在杏仁核的下调中无效。我们得出结论，疏离、分心和表达抑制共同招募了非常相似的情绪调节网络，而重新解释则与激活一个不同的网络有关，这使得这种调节策略具有特殊性。值得注意的是，重新解释在神经学方面也是最无效的策略，其效果可通过杏仁核激活的下调来衡量。
