Abstract

Adequate emotional control is essential for mental health. Deficiencies in emotion regulation are evident in many psychiatric disorders, including depression. Patients with depression show, for instance, disrupted neural emotion regulation in cognitive regulation regions such as lateral and medial prefrontal cortices. Since depressed individuals tend to attribute positive events to external circumstances and negative events to themselves, modifying this non-self-serving attributional style may represent a promising regulation strategy. Spontaneous causal attributions are generally processed in medial brain structures, particularly the precuneus. However, so far no study has investigated neural correlates of instructed causal attributions (e.g. instructing a person to intentionally relate positive events to the self) and their potential to regulate emotions. The current study therefore aimed to examine how instructed causal attributions of positive and negative events affect the emotional experience of depressed individuals as well as its neural bases. For this purpose pictures of sad and happy faces were presented to 26 patients with a lifetime major depression (MDD) and 26 healthy controls (HC) during fMRI. Participants should respond naturally (“view”) or imagine that the person on the picture was sad/happy because of them (“internal attribution”) or because something else happened (“external attribution”). Trait attributional style and depressive symptoms were assessed with questionnaires to examine potential influential factors on emotion regulation ability.Results revealed that patients compared to controls show a non-self-serving trait attributional style (i.e. more external attributions of positive events and more internal attributions of negative events). Intriguingly, when instructed to apply specific causal attributions during the emotion regulation task, patients and controls were similarly able to regulate positive and negative emotions. Regulating emotions through instructed attributions (internal/external attribution>view) generally engaged the precuneus, which was correlated with patients' trait attributional style (i.e. more precuneus activation during external>view was linked to a general tendency to relate positive events to external sources). Up-regulating happiness through internal (compared to external) attributions recruited the parahippocampal gyrus only in controls. The down-regulation of sadness (external>internal attribution), in contrast, engaged the superior frontal gyrus only in patients. Superior frontal gyrus activation thereby correlated with depression severity, which implies a greater need of cognitive resources for a successful regulation in more severely depressed. Patients and controls did not differ in activation in brain regions related to cognitive emotion regulation or attribution. However, results point to a disturbed processing of positive emotions in depression. Interestingly, increased precuneus resting-state connectivity with emotion regulation brain regions (inferior parietal lobule, middle frontal gyrus) was linked to healthier attributions (i.e. external attributions of negative events) in patients and controls. Adequate neural communication between these regions therefore seem to facilitate an adaptive trait attributional style. Findings of this study emphasize that despite patients' dysfunctional trait attributional style, explicitly applying causal attributions effectively regulates emotions. Future research should examine the efficacy of instructed attributions in reducing negative affect and anhedonia in depressed patients, for instance by means of attribution trainings during psychotherapy.

Highlights

  • Dysfunctional emotion regulation is one of the core symptoms of numerous mental disorders, including major depressive disorder (Aldao et al, 2010)

  • major depressive disorder (MDD) compared to healthy controls (HC) were expected to show impaired emotion regulation, reflected in differences in subjective emotion ratings during regulation as well as in compromised brain activation in the aforementioned brain regions. In addition to these a priori hypotheses, we aimed to explore resting-state connectivity of brain regions which we identified during the emotion regulation task and predicted attenuated connectivity in MDD compared to HC

  • Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons confirmed more internal attributions of negative events (p = .050) and less internal attributions of positive events (p < .001) in MDD compared to HC

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Summary

Introduction

Dysfunctional emotion regulation is one of the core symptoms of numerous mental disorders, including major depressive disorder (Aldao et al, 2010). Recent meta-analyses signify a cognitive emotion regulation network that is engaged when individuals intentionally change how they think about a situation (“reappraisal”). This network includes dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices as well as temporal and parietal regions (Kohn et al, 2014; Morawetz et al, 2017). A recent meta-analysis on seed-based resting-state connectivity, for instance, links major depressive disorder to an imbalanced connectivity among networks subserving emotion regulation: the authors identified hypoconnectivity between the affective network and the default network (e.g. the medial prefrontal cortex) as well as altered connectivity between ventral attention network seeds and the precuneus. Alterations in connectivity may underlie cognitive phenotypes of depression and relate to patients' deficits in emotion regulation (Kaiser et al, 2016; Stange et al, 2017)

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