In search of convergent regional brain abnormality in cognitive emotion regulation: A transdiagnostic neuroimaging meta‐analysis

Abstract

Ineffective use of adaptive cognitive strategies (e.g., reappraisal) to regulate emotional states is often reported in a wide variety of psychiatric disorders, suggesting a common characteristic across different diagnostic categories. However, the extent of shared neurobiological impairments is incompletely understood. This study, therefore, aimed to identify the transdiagnostic neural signature of disturbed reappraisal using the coordinate‐based meta‐analysis (CBMA) approach. Following the best‐practice guidelines for conducting neuroimaging meta‐analyses, we systematically searched PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science databases and tracked the references. Out of 1,608 identified publications, 32 whole‐brain neuroimaging studies were retrieved that compared brain activation in patients with psychiatric disorders and healthy controls during a reappraisal task. Then, the reported peak coordinates of group comparisons were extracted and several activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analyses were performed at three hierarchical levels to identify the potential spatial convergence: the global level (i.e., the pooled analysis and the analyses of increased/decreased activations), the experimental‐contrast level (i.e., the analyses of grouped data based on the regulation goal, stimulus valence, and instruction rule) and the disorder‐group level (i.e., the analyses across the experimental‐contrast level focused on increasing homogeneity of disorders). Surprisingly, none of our analyses provided significant convergent findings. This CBMA indicates a lack of transdiagnostic convergent regional abnormality related to reappraisal task, probably due to the complex nature of cognitive emotion regulation, heterogeneity of clinical populations, and/or experimental and statistical flexibility of individual studies.

Associating Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression With Psychopathological Symptoms

“…No doubt, emotion dysregulation in general represents a symptom across several psychiatric disorders (Gross and Jazaieri, 2014). This is paralleled by brain imaging studies in patients with various psychiatric disorders, also pointing to dysregulation in neural emotion regulation networks (Taylor and Liberzon, 2007;Gaebler et al, 2014;Rabinak et al, 2014;Wackerhagen et al, 2017Wackerhagen et al, , 2018Fitzgerald et al, 2019;Khodadadifar et al, 2022;Poon et al, 2022).…”

Adaptive emotion regulation is associated with decreased emotion-related responses in prefrontal and other cortical regions with multi-componential organization

“…Our findings of the three clusters of regions may elucidate the psychopathology of emotion regulation. The neural representations of the pathology during emotional processing vary across diseases (Schulze et al, 2019;Khodadadifar et al, 2022). Our three-cluster framework may help classify the different underlying mechanisms across diseases.…”

The antidepressant effect of cognitive reappraisal training on individuals cognitively vulnerable to depression: Could cognitive bias be modified through the prefrontal–amygdala circuits?

“…One other issue of concern for CR ability is that most previous CR tasks required the subjects to generate new CR strategies of emotional stimuli under guidance rather than spontaneously ( Khodadadifar et al, 2022 ), making it impossible to directly measure an individual’s spontaneous tendency to produce and maintain a CR strategy. According to the recent empirical literature, CR ability can be operationalized as either RE or reappraisal inventiveness (RI) ( Zeier et al, 2021 ), with RI independent of RE ( Zeier et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Notably, the neural mechanism of CR training effects is still unclear. First, deficits in CR for depressed individuals are related to aberrant activities in frontal cognitive control regions, which modulate the emotion generation regions ( Khodadadifar et al, 2022 ), and abnormalities in the structural covariance of the emotion regulation network ( Wu X. et al, 2017 ). (1) Cognitive control regions: The dorsolateral prefrontal lobe (dlPFC) and the ventrolateral prefrontal lobe (vlPFC) are responsible for storing and choosing appropriate CR strategies, respectively ( Morawetz et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Notably, the neural mechanism of CR training effects is still unclear. First, deficits in CR for depressed individuals are related to aberrant activities in frontal cognitive control regions, which modulate the emotion generation regions (Khodadadifar et al, 2022), and abnormalities in the structural covariance of the emotion regulation network (Wu X. et al, 2017).…”