Abstract
Emotion regulation is commonly characterized as involving conscious and intentional attempts to change felt emotions, such as, for example, through reappraisal whereby one intentionally decreases the intensity of one's emotional response to a particular stimulus or situation by reinterpreting it in a less threatening way. However, there is growing evidence and appreciation that some types of emotion regulation are unintentional or incidental, meaning that affective modulation is a consequence but not an explicit goal. For example, affect labeling involves simply verbally labeling the emotional content of an external stimulus or one's own affective responses without an intentional goal of altering emotional responses, yet has been associated with reduced affective responses at the neural and experiential levels. Although both intentional and incidental emotional regulation strategies have been associated with diminished limbic responses and self-reported distress, little previous research has directly compared their underlying neural mechanisms. In this study, we examined the extent to which incidental and intentional emotion regulation, namely, affect labeling and reappraisal, produced common and divergent neural and self-report responses to aversive images relative to an observe-only control condition in a sample of healthy older adults (N = 39). Affect labeling and reappraisal produced common activations in several prefrontal regulatory regions, with affect labeling producing stronger responses in direct comparisons. Affect labeling and reappraisal were also associated with similar decreases in amygdala activity. Finally, affect labeling and reappraisal were associated with correlated reductions in self-reported distress. Together these results point to common neurocognitive mechanisms involved in affect labeling and reappraisal, supporting the idea that intentional and incidental emotion regulation may utilize overlapping neural processes.
Highlights
Emotion regulation refers to processes that alter the character or intensity of emotional experiences
Given our strong a priori hypotheses regarding activity in specific brain regions, our analyses focused on these regions of interest (ROIs) which were defined using an anatomical atlas (Automatic Anatomical Labeling atlas, AAL; Tzourio-Mazoyer et al, 2002) within SPM5
Self-reported unpleasantness ratings during Label and Reappraise continued to be significantly positively correlated even when controlling for ratings during observe condition (Observe), indicating that to the extent individuals were able to use reappraisal to reduce their self-reported unpleasantness, they were proportionately able to use affect labeling to reduce their self-reported unpleasantness
Summary
Emotion regulation refers to processes that alter the character or intensity of emotional experiences. The capacity to effectively regulate negative emotional experiences, in particular, is essential for healthy mental and physical functioning (Gross and Thompson, 2007) Such control helps us navigate and survive the inevitable ups and downs of everyday life. While emotion regulation is commonly thought of as referring to conscious and intentional attempts to change felt emotions, there is growing evidence and appreciation that some types of emotion regulation are unintentional, automatic, or incidental byproducts of processes set in motion to serve non-regulatory goals (Mauss et al, 2007; Berkman and Lieberman, 2009; Berkman et al, 2009; Koole and Rothermund, 2011). Various emotion regulation strategies may be categorized as either “intentional” or “incidental.” While intentional and incidental emotion regulation seem to have similar emotion-modulatory effects, little research has directly compared their underlying neural mechanisms. In this study, we compared intentional and incidental emotion processing, namely, reappraisal and affect labeling, at the neural and experiential levels, to examine the extent to which they involve common vs. distinct neural and psychological mechanisms
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