Abstract
Emotion regulation is typically used to down-regulate negative or up-regulate positive emotions. While there is considerable evidence for the neural correlates of the former, less is known about the neural correlates of the latter—and how they are associated with emotion regulation and affect in daily life. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired from 63 healthy young participants (22 ± 1.6 years, 30 female), while they up-regulated their emotions to positive and neutral images or passively watched them. The same participants’ daily affect and emotion regulation behavior was measured using experience sampling over 10 days. Focusing on the ventral striatum (VS), previously associated with positive affective processing, we found increased activation during the up-regulation to both positive and neutral images. VS activation for the former positively correlated with between- and within-person differences in self-reported affective valence during fMRI but was not significantly associated with up-regulation in daily life. However, participants with lower daily affect showed a stronger association between changes in affect and activation in emotion-related (medial frontal and subcortical) regions—including the VS. These results support the involvement of the VS in up-regulating positive emotions and suggest a neurobehavioral link between emotion-related brain activation and daily affect.
Highlights
Our emotional experiences are characterized by ups and downs
Previous neuroimaging studies have mainly focused on the down-regulation of negative emotions and identified brain regions or networks supporting this type of regulation: most often, ‘cognitive control’ regions in prefrontal and parietal cortices have been shown to modulate subcortical regions involved in emotional responding
Participants had a greater change in AffValESM, the more strongly they up-regulated their positive emotions
Summary
Our emotional experiences are characterized by ups and downs. While these changes depend on situations we encounter, we influence how we feel by deliberately up- or downregulating our emotions. The few existing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that examined the up-regulation of positive emotions reported increased activation in the VS—along with activation in medial and lateral prefrontal areas (similar to the down-regulation of negative emotion), the temporal lobe and the anterior cingulate (Kim and Hamann, 2007; Vrticka et al, 2011; Greening et al, 2014; Moutsiana et al, 2014; Li et al, 2018). Previous studies that found increased activation in the VS during the up-regulation of positive emotions used a condition of ‘naturally’ viewing positive stimuli as a baseline This way, one contrasts regulatory processes on the one hand and passive states on the other. Ever-changing contexts and an individual’s interaction with them naturally result in varying regulatory efforts and varying affective states
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