Abstract
Why are some people more susceptible to interference from previous emotional stimuli? Neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation are typically studied with one-off positive or negative stimuli. Less is known about how they operate during dynamic emotional experiences, which more closely resemble how emotions occur in real life. Therefore, we investigated the interaction among temporal context, stimulus content, and regulatory strategy. Image sequences included either neutral to negative emotion or negative to neutral emotion. Participants were instructed to either passively watch the emotional stimuli or apply cognitive reappraisal during the image sequences presentation. Participants also reported their habitual use of cognitive reappraisal in their daily lives on a standard scale. We measured functional connectivity (FC) with electroencephalography (EEG) source localization. A three-way interaction suggested that, in addition to momentary emotional content and regulatory effort, the temporal context of stimuli impacts the FC between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in both alpha and beta frequency bands. In the reappraisal condition—but not the passive watch conditions—, individual differences in habitual reappraisal were manifested in the FC of vmPFC-ACC in alpha band. Emotion transitions may be more demanding because prefrontal-posterior FC in the beta band decreased during emotion transitions regardless of emotional content or regulation efforts. Flexible emotion regulation enables the recruiting of neural activities in response to the content of dynamic, ever-changing experiences encountered in daily life. Studying brain responses to dynamic emotional stimuli may shed light on individual differences in adaptation and psychological health. It also provides a more ecologically valid assessment of emotion regulation.
Highlights
Emotions are important in influencing how we think and behave
The coupling between ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) was stronger in the reappraisal task, which implies that the reappraisal recruited the frontoparietal network supporting cognitive control
As we argued in the introduction, there are reasons to suspect that emotional context and timing matters for the neural responses of emotional experiences
Summary
Emotions are important in influencing how we think and behave. emotional experiences in real life rarely occur in a vacuum. Most research on the neural substrates of temporal dynamics of emotions has focused on reactions to stimuli within a single emotional category, such as negative content (e.g., Gianotti et al, 2008; Thiruchselvam et al, 2011; Dan-Glauser and Gross, 2015). This means that the examination of emotion regulation has largely been studied apart from emotion dynamics
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