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, M age = 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 GE MRI 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.

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Over the past decade research has increased on dynamics between mindfulness, positive affect, and pain. While there have been studies examining the direct use of positive psychology for pain management, few have examined the use of a specific mindfulness-enhanced positive affect induction (i.e. a singular brief technique engendering mindfulness and strong positive affect) toward acute pain and pain flare management. This topical commentary discusses the need for such a technique toward bolstered gold-standard interventions, related studies, and possible future directions for acute and post-surgical pain management. Future research is encouraged to build from prior research on loving-kindness meditation and examine novel, brief mindfulness-enhanced positive affect inductions for acute pain management.

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