Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri.
Department of Psychiatry, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri.
Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging. 2021 Jan;6(1):89-98. doi: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2020.08.018. Epub 2020 Sep 11.
Effective emotion regulation (ER) may be supported by 1) accurate emotion identification, encoding, and maintenance of emotional states and related brain activity of regions involved in emotional response (i.e., amygdala, ventral/posterior insula) and 2) cognitive processes that implement reframing, supported by activation in cognitive control brain regions (e.g., frontal, insular, and parietal cortices). The purpose of this project was to examine how emotion labeling ability in early childhood is related to ER concurrently and prospectively.
Data from a prospective longitudinal study of youths at risk for depression, including measures of emotion labeling (i.e., Facial Affect Comprehension Evaluation) and ER ability (i.e., Emotion Regulation Checklist) and strategy use (i.e., Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, Children's Response Style Questionnaire), and functional magnetic resonance imaging data during a sadness ER task (N = 139) were examined.
Findings from multilevel modeling and linear regression suggested that greater emotion labeling ability of more difficult emotions in early childhood was associated with enhanced parent-reported ER in adolescence, but not with a tendency to engage in adaptive or maladaptive ER strategies. Recognition of fear and surprise predicted greater activation in cortical regions involved in cognitive control during an ER of sadness task, including in the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and inferior frontal gyrus.
These findings suggest that early ability to identify and label difficult facial emotions in early childhood is associated with better ER in adolescence and enhanced activity of cognitive control regions of the brain.
有效的情绪调节（ER）可能受到以下两个方面的支持：1）准确识别情绪、编码情绪状态以及维持情绪状态，并与情绪反应相关的大脑区域（即杏仁核、腹侧/后内侧脑岛）的相关脑活动保持一致；2）认知过程，即通过认知控制大脑区域（如额叶、脑岛和顶叶皮层）的激活来实现重新构建。本项目旨在探讨儿童早期的情绪标签能力如何与 ER 同时和前瞻性相关。
对有抑郁风险的青少年进行前瞻性纵向研究的数据被用于本研究，包括情绪标签能力（即面部情感理解评估）和 ER 能力（即情绪调节检查表）以及策略使用（即认知情绪调节问卷、儿童反应风格问卷）的测量，以及在悲伤 ER 任务期间的功能磁共振成像数据（N=139）。
多层次建模和线性回归的结果表明，儿童早期更难的情绪的情绪标签能力越强，青少年时期的父母报告的 ER 能力越强，但与采用适应性或非适应性 ER 策略的倾向无关。恐惧和惊讶的识别预测了悲伤 ER 任务中与认知控制相关的皮层区域（包括脑岛、前扣带皮层、背内侧前额叶皮层和下额回）的更大激活。
这些发现表明，儿童早期识别和标记困难面部情绪的能力与青少年时期更好的 ER 能力以及大脑认知控制区域的活动增强有关。
