Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2020 Apr;20(2):387-407. doi: 10.3758/s13415-020-00775-8.
When confronted with unwanted negative emotions, individuals use a variety of cognitive strategies for regulating these emotions. The brain mechanisms underlying these emotion regulation strategies have not been fully characterized, and it is not yet clear whether these mechanisms vary as a function of emotion intensity. To address these issues, 30 community participants (17 females, 13 males, M = 24.3 years) completed a picture-viewing emotion regulation task with neutral viewing, reacting to negative stimuli, cognitive reappraisal, attentional deployment, and self-distancing conditions. Brain and behavioral data were simultaneously collected in a 3T GE MRI scanner. Findings indicated that prefrontal regions were engaged by all three regulation strategies, but reappraisal showed the least amount of increase in activity as a function of intensity. Overall, these results suggest that there are both brain and behavioral effects of intensity and that intensity is useful for probing strategy-specific effects and the relationships between the strategies. Furthermore, while these three strategies showed significant overlap, there also were specific strategy-intensity interactions, such as frontoparietal control regions being preferentially activated by reappraisal and self-distancing. Conversely, self-referential and attentional regions were preferentially recruited by self-distancing and distraction as intensity increased. Overall, these findings are consistent with the notion that there is a continuum of cognitive emotion regulation along which all three of these strategies lie.
当面对不想要的负面情绪时，个体使用各种认知策略来调节这些情绪。这些情绪调节策略的大脑机制尚未得到充分描述，也不清楚这些机制是否会随着情绪强度的变化而变化。为了解决这些问题，30 名社区参与者（17 名女性，13 名男性，M=24.3 岁）在 3T GE MRI 扫描仪中同时完成了中性观看、对负性刺激的反应、认知重评、注意力部署和自我疏远条件的图片观看情绪调节任务。研究结果表明，前额叶区域被三种调节策略所激活，但再评价的活动增加量最少，随着强度的增加而增加。总的来说，这些结果表明，强度既有大脑效应又有行为效应，并且强度可用于探测策略特异性效应和策略之间的关系。此外，尽管这三种策略表现出显著的重叠，但也存在特定的策略-强度相互作用，例如，前额顶叶控制区域被再评价和自我疏远优先激活。相反，随着强度的增加，自我参照和注意力区域优先被自我疏远和分心所招募。总的来说，这些发现与以下观点一致，即存在一个连续的认知情绪调节连续体，这三种策略都位于其中。
