Abstract
The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated how trait neuroticism and its heterogeneous subdimensions are related to the emotional consequences and neural underpinnings of emotion regulation. Two levels of neuroticism assessments were conducted with 47 female subjects, who were required to attend to, suppress emotion displays to, or cognitively reappraise the meanings of negative images. The results showed reduced emotional experience and bilateral amygdala activation during reappraisal, and this regulation effect is unaffected by individual differences in neuroticism and its subdimensions. By contrast, the emotion downregulation effect of suppression in the right amygdala is compromised with increasing self-consciousness but not overall neuroticism dimension. This association holds robust after controlling the potential contribution of habitual suppression. Moreover, the psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis revealed that self-consciousness predicts weaker functional coupling of the right amygdala to supplementary motor area and putamen during expressive suppression, two regions mediating the control and execution of motor actions. These findings suggest that self-consciousness predicts increased difficulty in emotional regulation using expressive suppression; and that the heterogeneous nature of trait neuroticism needs to be considered in exploring the association of neuroticism and emotion regulation.
Highlights
The term emotion regulation refers to those processes that influence the generation, the experience and the expression of emotions[1]
We focused on anxiety, depression and self-consciousness subdimensions that have been suggested to be highly relevant to habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression
The current fMRI study aimed at investigating the association between trait neuroticism and neural and behavioral indices of negative emotion regulation
Summary
The term emotion regulation refers to those processes that influence the generation, the experience and the expression of emotions[1]. It has been found that neuroticism is negatively associated with the extent of habitual use of cognitive reappraisal[14, 15] What these studies measured are the self-reported attempts, or tendencies of www.nature.com/scientificreports/. We focused on the two common emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. In the well-known process model of emotion regulation[1, 16], the reappraisal and suppression strategies were typical antecedent-focused and response-focused strategies, respectively. The former regulates emotional response tendencies early on, before they give rise to full-fledged responses. Response-focused strategy works late in the emotion-generative process, by modulating the behavioral output of the emotional reaction, after the emotional response has been fully generated
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