Abstract
Even in the presence of negative information, healthy human beings display an optimistic tendency when thinking of past success and future chances, giving a positive bias to everyday's cognition. The tendency to actively select positive thoughts suggests the existence of a mechanism to exclude negative content, raising the issue of its dependence on mechanisms like those of effortful control. Using perfusion imaging, we examined how brain activations differed according to whether participants were left to prefer positive thoughts spontaneously, or followed an explicit instruction to the same effect, finding a widespread dissociation of brain perfusion patterns. Under spontaneous processing of emotional material, recruitment of areas associated with effortful attention, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was reduced relative to instructed avoidance of negative material (F 1,58 = 26.24, p = 0.047, corrected). Under spontaneous avoidance perfusion increments were observed in several areas that were deactivated by the task, including the perigenual medial prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, individual differences in executive capacity were not associated with positive bias. These findings suggest that spontaneous positive cognitive emotion regulation in health may result from processes that, while actively suppressing emotionally salient information, differ from those associated with effortful and directed control.
Highlights
An aspect of healthy mental functioning is the positive connotation of thoughts arising spontaneously or occasioned by external stimuli, as is demonstrated by the reversal of this positive bias in depression [1] and the protective effect of optimism for mental and physical health [2]
Neuroimaging Results To verify that the perfusion technique was successful, and identify areas involved in the task, we first contrasted the conditions in which subjects were forming sentences, irrespective of valence and instruction, against the baseline perfusion at rest
This preliminary contrast revealed the activation of areas known to be involved in attentional and linguistic processing [40], such as posterior parietal, dorsal cingulate, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) extending superiorly towards the precentral sulcus, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex/anterior insula (VLPFC/AI)
Summary
An aspect of healthy mental functioning is the positive connotation of thoughts arising spontaneously or occasioned by external stimuli, as is demonstrated by the reversal of this positive bias in depression [1] and the protective effect of optimism for mental and physical health [2]. There are clear instances in which avoiding negative cognitions follows an intentional, effortful strategy, as when one tries to put worries to rest [4] or explicitly reappraises stimuli in a more favourable light [5] In these situations, effortful control and reflective reasoning are responsible for keeping negative thoughts at bay. Effortful control and reflective reasoning are responsible for keeping negative thoughts at bay This conclusion is consistent with attributing to cognitive control processes, like those underlying voluntary effort, a decisive role in determining the direction of thoughts and maintaining a positive mood [6,7], and with modelling psychiatric disorders as involving the failure of such control [8,9,10,11]. By focusing on the capacity of top-down control processes to second or resist the attentional pull of emotional stimuli, these studies have demonstrated the crucial role played in this respect by the prefrontal cortex [5,12,13,14,15]
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