Emotion regulation, attention to emotion, and the ventral attentional network

Roberto Viviani

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00746

Abstract

Accounts of the effect of emotional information on behavioral response and current models of emotion regulation are based on two opposed but interacting processes: automatic bottom-up processes (triggered by emotionally arousing stimuli) and top-down control processes (mapped to prefrontal cortical areas). Data on the existence of a third attentional network operating without recourse to limited-capacity processes but influencing response raise the issue of how it is integrated in emotion regulation. We summarize here data from attention to emotion, voluntary emotion regulation, and on the origin of biases against negative content suggesting that the ventral network is modulated by exposure to emotional stimuli when the task does not constrain the handling of emotional content. In the parietal lobes, preferential activation of ventral areas associated with “bottom-up” attention by ventral network theorists is strongest in studies of cognitive reappraisal. In conditions when no explicit instruction is given to change one's response to emotional stimuli, control of emotionally arousing stimuli is observed without concomitant activation of the dorsal attentional network, replaced by a shift of activation toward ventral areas. In contrast, in studies where emotional stimuli are placed in the role of distracter, the observed deactivation of these ventral semantic association areas is consistent with the existence of proactive control on the role emotional representations are allowed to take in generating response. It is here argued that attentional orienting mechanisms located in the ventral network constitute an intermediate kind of process, with features only partially in common with effortful and automatic processes, which plays an important role in handling emotion by conveying the influence of semantic networks, with which the ventral network is co-localized. Current neuroimaging work in emotion regulation has neglected this system by focusing on a bottom-up/top-down dichotomy of attentional control.

Highlights

Emotion and emotion regulation are important issues in clinical neurosciences because disturbed affect, impulsivity, and low control capacity are common in psychopathology
FOR FUTURE RESEARCH The present review has been motivated by the contrast between theories highlighting the existence of a ventral network and those adopted by studies of attention to emotion and emotion regulation
These latter employ a dual-process model to interpret their data based on the opposition between sensory salience of stimuli competing for attention and top-down bias to influence the outcome of this competition

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Emotion and emotion regulation are important issues in clinical neurosciences because disturbed affect, impulsivity, and low control capacity are common in psychopathology. NEUROIMAGING STUDIES OF ATTENTION TO EMOTION AND MEMORY The studies of attention to emotion that will be considered here are those where emotional stimuli are used as cues (as in spatial attention paradigms) or as distracters, or are present in the stimulus set without providing information for the task This restriction is justified by the consideration that, if emotional content is selected on the basis of a voluntary effort, there is no reason to assume that this selection cannot take place on the basis of processes instantiated in the dorsal attentional network (i.e., the dual-process and the alternative model presented here lead to the same prediction). Beneficial effects of reflexive orienting in an ecologically complex setting

DISCUSSION AND PERSPECTIVES

Findings

METHODS