IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy.
University of Pisa, Italy.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2021 Oct 1;33(11):2342-2356. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01753.
Emotion self-regulation relies both on cognitive and behavioral strategies implemented to modulate the subjective experience and/or the behavioral expression of a given emotion. Although it is known that a network encompassing fronto-cingulate and parietal brain areas is engaged during successful emotion regulation, the functional mechanisms underlying failures in emotion suppression (ES) are still unclear. In order to investigate this issue, we analyzed video and high-density EEG recordings of 20 healthy adult participants during an ES and a free expression task performed on two consecutive days. Changes in facial expression during ES, but not free expression, were preceded by local increases in sleep-like activity (1-4 Hz) in brain areas responsible for emotional suppression, including bilateral anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, and in right middle/inferior frontal gyrus (p < .05, corrected). Moreover, shorter sleep duration the night before the ES experiment correlated with the number of behavioral errors (p = .03) and tended to be associated with higher frontal sleep-like activity during ES failures (p = .09). These results indicate that local sleep-like activity may represent the cause of ES failures in humans and may offer a functional explanation for previous observations linking lack of sleep, changes in frontal activity, and emotional dysregulation.
情绪的自我调节既依赖于认知策略，也依赖于行为策略，这些策略被用来调节特定情绪的主观体验和/或行为表现。尽管众所周知，在成功的情绪调节过程中，包括额顶叶和顶叶脑区在内的网络被激活，但情绪抑制（ES）失败的功能机制仍不清楚。为了研究这个问题，我们分析了 20 名健康成年参与者在连续两天进行 ES 和自由表达任务时的视频和高密度 EEG 记录。在 ES 期间，而不是在自由表达期间，面部表情的变化之前，负责情绪抑制的脑区（包括双侧前岛叶和前扣带回皮层，以及右侧中/下额回）的睡眠样活动（1-4 Hz）局部增加（p <.05，校正）。此外，ES 实验前一天晚上的睡眠时间较短与行为错误的数量相关（p =.03），并且在 ES 失败期间，睡眠时间较短与额叶睡眠样活动增加相关（p =.09）。这些结果表明，局部睡眠样活动可能是人类 ES 失败的原因，并为先前的观察结果提供了一种功能解释，这些观察结果将缺乏睡眠、额叶活动变化和情绪失调联系起来。
