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
All Rights Reserved.

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 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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Publication Title

Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience

Volume

20

First Page

387

Last Page

407

ISSN

1531-135X

PubMed ID

32133586

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