Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2023 Mar;44(4):1456-1475. doi: 10.1002/hbm.26133. Epub 2022 Nov 10.
The ability to regulate emotions is indispensable for maintaining psychological health. It heavily relies on frontal lobe functions which are disrupted in frontal lobe epilepsy. Accordingly, emotional dysregulation and use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies have been reported in frontal lobe epilepsy patients. Therefore, it is of clinical and scientific interest to investigate emotion regulation in frontal lobe epilepsy. We studied neural correlates of upregulating and downregulating emotions toward aversive pictures through reappraisal in 18 frontal lobe epilepsy patients and 17 healthy controls using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients tended to report more difficulties with impulse control than controls. On the neural level, patients had diminished activity during upregulation in distributed left-sided regions, including ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, angular gyrus and anterior temporal gyrus. Patients also showed less activity than controls in the left precuneus for upregulation compared to downregulation. Unlike controls, they displayed no task-related activity changes in the left amygdala, whereas the right amygdala showed task-related modulations in both groups. Upregulation-related activity changes in the left inferior frontal gyrus, insula, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus were correlated with questionnaire data on habitual emotion regulation. Our results show that structural or functional impairments in the frontal lobes disrupt neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation through reappraisal throughout the brain, including posterior regions involved in semantic control. Findings on the amygdala as a major target of emotion regulation are in line with the view that specifically the left amygdala is connected with semantic processing networks.
情绪调节能力对于维持心理健康是不可或缺的。它主要依赖于额叶功能，而额叶癫痫会干扰额叶功能。因此，额叶癫痫患者存在情绪调节障碍和使用适应不良的情绪调节策略的报道。因此，研究额叶癫痫患者的情绪调节具有临床和科学意义。我们使用功能磁共振成像研究了 18 名额叶癫痫患者和 17 名健康对照者在重新评估时对厌恶图片进行上调和下调情绪的神经相关因素。患者比对照组更倾向于报告冲动控制困难。在神经水平上，患者在左半球分布区域（包括腹外侧和背内侧前额叶皮层、角回和前颞叶）的上调过程中活动减少。与下调相比，患者的左楔前叶在进行上调时的活动也比对照组少。与对照组不同的是，他们的左杏仁核在任务相关活动中没有变化，而右杏仁核在两组中都表现出任务相关的调节。左额下回、岛叶、眶额皮层、前后扣带回和楔前叶的上调相关活动变化与习惯性情绪调节问卷数据相关。我们的研究结果表明，额叶的结构或功能损伤会通过重新评估扰乱大脑中情绪调节的神经机制，包括涉及语义控制的后区。杏仁核作为情绪调节的主要靶点的发现与以下观点一致，即左侧杏仁核与语义处理网络相连。
