Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC, USA.
Department of Neuroscience, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston Salem, NC, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Sep 1;12(9):1448-1459. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx071.
Assessing emotional dynamics in the brain offers insight into the fundamental neural and psychological mechanisms underlying emotion. One such dynamic is emotional inertia-the influence of one's emotional state at one time point on one's emotional state at a subsequent time point. Emotion inertia reflects emotional rigidity and poor emotion regulation as evidenced by its relationship to depression and neuroticism. In this study, we assessed changes in cerebral blood flow (CBF) from before to after an emotional task and used these changes to predict stress, positive and negative emotional inertia in daily life events. Cerebral blood flow changes in the lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) predicted decreased non-specific emotional inertia, suggesting that the lPFC may feature a general inhibitory mechanism responsible for limiting the impact that an emotional state from one event has on the emotional state of a subsequent event. CBF changes in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and lateral occipital cortex were associated with positive emotional inertia and negative/stress inertia, respectively. These data advance the blossoming literature on the temporal dynamics of emotion in the brain and on the use of neural indices to predict mental health-relevant behavior in daily life.
评估大脑中的情绪动态可以深入了解情绪的基本神经和心理机制。其中一种动态是情绪惯性——一个人在一个时间点的情绪状态对随后时间点的情绪状态的影响。情绪惯性反映了情绪的僵硬和情绪调节能力差，这与其与抑郁和神经质的关系有关。在这项研究中，我们评估了情绪任务前后的大脑血液流量 (CBF) 的变化，并使用这些变化来预测日常生活事件中的压力、积极和消极情绪惯性。外侧前额叶皮层 (lPFC) 的 CBF 变化预测了非特异性情绪惯性的降低，这表明 lPFC 可能具有一般的抑制机制，负责限制一个事件的情绪状态对随后事件的情绪状态的影响。腹内侧前额叶皮层和外侧枕叶皮层的 CBF 变化分别与积极情绪惯性和消极/压力惯性相关。这些数据推进了关于大脑中情绪的时间动态以及使用神经指标预测日常生活中与心理健康相关的行为的新兴文献。
