The Neural Bases of Cognitive Emotion Regulation: The Roles of Strategy and Intensity
Publication Date
4-2020
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology
Keywords
Emotion regulation, Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Cognitive reappraisal, Emotion intensity
Abstract
When confronted with unwanted negative emotions, individuals use a variety of cognitive strategies for regulating these emotions. The brain mechanisms underlying these emotion regulation strategies have not been fully characterized, and it is not yet clear whether these mechanisms vary as a function of emotion intensity. To address these issues, 30 community participants (17 females, 13 males, Mage = 24.3 years) completed a picture-viewing emotion regulation task with neutral viewing, reacting to negative stimuli, cognitive reappraisal, attentional deployment, and self-distancing conditions. Brain and behavioral data were simultaneously collected in a 3T GEMRI scanner. Findings indicated that prefrontal regions were engaged by all three regulation strategies, but reappraisal showed the least amount of increase in activity as a function of intensity. Overall, these results suggest that there are both brain and behavioral effects of intensity and that intensity is useful for probing strategy-specific effects and the relationships between the strategies. Furthermore, while these three strategies showed significant overlap, there also were specific strategy-intensity interactions, such as frontoparietal control regions being preferentially activated by reappraisal and self-distancing. Conversely, self-referential and attentional regions were preferentially recruited by self-distancing and distraction as intensity increased. Overall, these findings are consistent with the notion that there is a continuum of cognitive emotion regulation along which all three of these strategies lie.
Copyright Date
3-4-2020
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
All Rights Reserved.
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by The Psychonomic Society, Inc. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:
Moodie, C.A., Suri, G., Goerlitz, D.S. Mateen, M. A., Sheppes, G., McRae, K.,... , & Gross, J. J. (2020). The neural bases of cognitive emotion regulation: The roles of strategy and intensity. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 20, 387–407. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00775-8
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Rights Holder
The Psychonomic Society Inc.
Provenance
Received from author
File Format
application/pdf
Language
English (eng)
Extent
21 pgs
File Size
10.0 MB
Publication Title
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience
Volume
20
First Page
387
Last Page
407
ISSN
1531-135X
PubMed ID
32133586
Recommended Citation
Moodie, Craig A.; Suri, Gaurav; Goerlitz, Dustin S.; Mateen, Maria A.; Sheppes, Gal; McRae, Kateri; Lakhan-Pal, Shreya; Thiruchselvam, Ravi; and Gross, James J., "The Neural Bases of Cognitive Emotion Regulation: The Roles of Strategy and Intensity" (2020). Psychology: Faculty Scholarship. 204.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/psychology_faculty/204
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00775-8