Abstract
Instructed fear, which denotes fearful emotions learned from others’ verbal instructions, is an important form of fear acquisition in humans. Maladaptive instructed fear produces detrimental effects on health, but little is known about performing an efficient regulation of instructed fear and its underlying neural substrates. To address this question, 26 subjects performed an instructed fear task where emotional experiences and functional neuroimages were recorded during watching, explicit regulation (calmness imagination), and implicit regulation (calmness priming) conditions. Results indicated that implicit regulation decreased activity in the left amygdala and left insula for instructed fear; however, these effects were absent in explicit regulation. The implementation of implicit regulation did not increase activity in the frontoparietal control regions, while explicit regulation increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity. Furthermore, implicit regulation increased functional connectivity between the right amygdala and right fusiform gyrus, and decreased functional connectivity between the right medial temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, which are key nodes of memory retrieval and cognitive control networks, respectively. These findings suggest a favourable effect of implicit regulation on instructed fear, which is subserved by less involvement of control-related brain mechanisms.
Highlights
Emotion regulation is critical to avoid the adverse effects of abnormal fear, which can be realized by both explicit and implicit processes (Gyurak et al, 2011)
In order to compare the cognitive cost of regulating fear explicitly and implicitly, we examined differences in activity changes in the typical frontoparietal cognitive control regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and inferior parietal lobule (IPL) (Ochsner et al, 2002; Lewis and Miall, 2003; Harvey et al, 2005; Dosenbach et al, 2008; Goldin et al, 2008; Vincent et al, 2008; Niendam et al, 2012; Power and Petersen, 2013)
ANOVA in implicit than in explicit (left: p = 0.012, Figure 5D; right: revealed similar activities across watching, explicit, and implicit conditions in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) [F(2, 44) = 1.04, p = 0.36, Figure 5A] and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) [F(2,44) = 2.65, p = 0.08, Figure 5C]. These results suggest that explicit regulation by calmness imagination increased cognitive cost, whereas implicit regulation of instructed fear by calmness priming worked without increasing cognitive cost in dACC, bilateral dlPFC, and bilateral IPL activation
Summary
Emotion regulation is critical to avoid the adverse effects of abnormal fear, which can be realized by both explicit and implicit processes (Gyurak et al, 2011). IER has proven valid in reducing stress or frustration-related physiological activity (Mauss et al, 2007; Eder, 2011; Yuan et al, 2015a) without maladaptive cardiovascular consequences or cognitive resource depletion (Bonanno et al, 2004; Mauss et al, 2007; Fiori, 2009; Gyurak et al, 2011) Based on these findings, we predicted that IER may decrease activity in the amygdala and insula without increasing activity in cognitive control regions (e.g., dlPFC, ACC, and IPL), a beneficial effect most likely absent during EER. According to the evidence reviewed above, we predicted that functional coupling subserving cognitive control that is centred in the prefrontal cortex may be enhanced during EER, an effect that should be absent during IER
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