Abstract
Emotion regulation is an indispensable part of mental health and adaptive behavior. Research into emotion regulation processes has largely focused on the concurrent effects of volitional emotion regulation. However, there is scarce evidence considering post-regulatory effects with regard to neural mechanisms and emotional experiences. Therefore, we compared concurrent effects of cognitive emotion regulation with effects at different (immediate, short- and long-term) time intervals. In an fMRI study with N = 46 (N = 30 at re-exposure) young healthy adults, we compared neuronal responses to negative and neutral pictures while participants had to distance themselves from or to actively permit emotions in response to these pictures. We investigated the temporal dynamics of activation changes related to regulation in cognitive control brain networks as well as in the amygdala during stimulation (concurrent effects, timepoint 1) and post-stimulation (immediate, timepoint 2), as well as during re-exposure with the same pictures after short (10 minutes, timepoint 3) and long (1 week, timepoint 4) time intervals. At timepoint 1, negative pictures (versus neutral pictures) elicited a strong response in regions of affective processing, including the amygdala. Distancing (as compared to permit) led to a decrease of this response, and to an increase of activation in the right middle frontal and inferior parietal cortex. We observed an interaction effect of time (stimulation vs. post-stimulation) and regulation (distance vs. permit), indicating a partial reversal of regulation effects during the post-stimulation phase (timepoint 2). Similarly, after 10 minutes (timepoint 3) and after 1 week (timepoint 4), activation in the amygdala was higher during pictures that participants were previously instructed to distance from as compared to permit. These results show that the temporal dynamics are highly variable both within experimental trials and across brain regions. This can even take the form of paradoxical aftereffects at immediate and persistent effects at prolonged time scales.
Highlights
Research on emotion regulation is based on the basic tenet that subjective experience and physiological reactions are susceptible to voluntary regulation efforts, and that this constitutes an adaption to complex and changing environments [1]
We investigated the temporal dynamics of activation changes related to regulation in cognitive control brain networks as well as in the amygdala during stimulation and post-stimulation, as well as during re-exposure with the same pictures after short (10 minutes, timepoint 3) and long (1 week, timepoint 4) time intervals
After 10 minutes and after 1 week, activation in the amygdala was higher during pictures that participants were previously instructed to distance from as compared to permit. These results show that the temporal dynamics are highly variable both within experimental trials and across brain regions
Summary
Research on emotion regulation is based on the basic tenet that subjective experience and physiological reactions are susceptible to voluntary regulation efforts, and that this constitutes an adaption to complex and changing environments [1]. While there are different strategies of emotion regulation, according to the Process Model of Emotion Regulation [2], they all have in common that they alter the subjective experience of an emotion by means of (cognitive) top-down influences. The Process Model of Emotion Regulation [2] distinguishes five strategies of emotion regulation according to the timepoint in the emotion generation process at which they are implemented: Situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change (often referred to as reappraisal), and response modulation. Reappraisal can be further divided into different tactics, as well [3]: Reinterpretation, i.e. changing the meaning of a stimulus [8], and distancing (previously often referred to as detachment) [see our own work, 9,10]. Objective distancing has been shown to effectively downregulate negative emotions and activate brain regions implied in cognitive control [3,4,12], offering an effective form of emotion regulation to investigate neural correlates and temporal dynamics of successful emotion regulation
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