Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Faculty of Medicin, RWTH Aachen, Pauwelsstr. 30, 52074, Aachen, Germany.
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2019 Oct;269(7):803-811. doi: 10.1007/s00406-018-0920-4. Epub 2018 Jul 14.
Emotion regulation (ER) is crucial in terms of mental health and social functioning. Attention deployment (AD) and cognitive reappraisal (CR) are both efficient cognitive ER strategies, which are based on partially dissociated neural effects. Our understanding of the neural underpinnings of ER is based on laboratory paradigms that study changes of the brain activation related to isolated emotional stimuli. To track the neural response to ER in the changing and dynamic environment of daily life, we extended the common existing paradigms by applying a sequence of emotionally provocative stimuli involving three aversive images. Eighteen participants completed an ER paradigm, in which they had to either shift their attention away from the emotionally negative images by counting backwards (AD strategy) or reinterpret the meaning of stimuli (CR strategy) to attain a down-regulation of affective responses. An increased recruitment of left-sided lateral and medial PFC was shown upon regulation of negative emotions with CR as compared to AD. Remarkably, the amygdala activation showed an increasing pattern of activation during CR. The inverse relationship between PFC and amygdala was compromised during elongated blocks of reappraisal, reflecting a reduction in engagement of the top-down prefrontal regulatory circuitry upon repeated exposure to negative stimuli. These results highlight that temporal dynamic of amygdala response and its functional connectivity differentiates AD and CR strategies in regulating emotions. Findings of the current study underscore the importance of adopting temporally variant approaches for investigating the neural effects of ER. Identifying neural systems that subserve down-regulation of negative emotions is of importance in developing treatment strategies for various forms of psychopathology.
情绪调节（ER）在心理健康和社交功能方面至关重要。注意部署（AD）和认知重评（CR）都是有效的认知 ER 策略，它们基于部分分离的神经效应。我们对 ER 的神经基础的理解是基于实验室范式，这些范式研究与孤立的情绪刺激相关的大脑激活变化。为了跟踪日常生活中不断变化和动态的环境中的 ER 神经反应，我们通过应用一系列涉及三张令人不快的图像的情感刺激性刺激来扩展常见的现有范式。十八名参与者完成了 ER 范式，他们必须通过倒数（AD 策略）或重新解释刺激的含义（CR 策略）来转移注意力，从而降低情感反应。与 AD 相比，CR 调节负面情绪时显示出左侧外侧和内侧 PFC 的募集增加。值得注意的是，杏仁核在 CR 期间表现出激活增加的模式。在反复暴露于负面刺激时，PFC 和杏仁核之间的反向关系受到损害，反映出在重复接触负面刺激时，自上而下的前额叶调节回路的参与减少。这些结果表明，杏仁核反应的时间动态及其功能连接区分了 AD 和 CR 策略在调节情绪方面的作用。当前研究的结果强调了采用时间变化方法研究 ER 的神经效应的重要性。确定支持负面情绪下调的神经系统对于开发各种形式的精神病理学的治疗策略非常重要。
