Inhibition of emotions in healthy aging: age‐related differences in brain network connectivity

Abstract

Introduction Successful inhibition of distracting emotions is important for preserving well‐being and daily functioning. There is conflicting evidence regarding the impact of healthy aging on emotional inhibition, and possible age‐related alterations in the neuronal underpinnings of emotional interference processing are unexplored. Methods Thirty younger (mean age 26 years; 15 women) and 30 older (mean age 71 years; 13 women) healthy adults performed a face–word emotional Stroop task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. A resting‐state scan was acquired for calculating the amplitude of low‐frequency fluctuations as an estimate of vascular reactivity. Comparisons of brain activation during the task were assessed in a whole‐brain, voxel‐wise analysis, contrasting congruent, and incongruent conditions. The canonical regions of the frontoparietal, salience, dorsal attention, and default mode networks were used as seed regions for assessing functional connectivity within and between large‐scale brain networks. Task performance was evaluated using response accuracy and response time. Results The older adults had longer response times and lower task accuracy than the younger adults, but the emotional interference effect was not significantly different between the groups. Whole‐brain analysis revealed no significant age‐related differences in brain activation patterns. Rescaling the data for estimated variability in vascular reactivity did not affect the results. In older adults, there was relatively stronger functional connectivity with the default mode network, the sensorimotor network, and the dorsal attention network for the frontoparietal and salience network seeds during the task. Conversely, younger adults had relatively stronger connections within and between the frontoparietal and salience networks. Conclusion In this first fMRI study of emotional Stroop interference in older and younger adults, we found that the emotional interference effect was unchanged in healthy aging and replicated the finding from non‐emotional task studies that older adults have greater between‐network and less within‐network connectivity compared to younger adults.

Distinct neural activation patterns of age in subcomponents of inhibitory control: A fMRI meta-analysis

“…Cognitive inhibition can be captured by paradigms including the Stroop, Flanker, and Simon and stimulus response compatibility (SRC) (Stahl et al, 2014;van Velzen et al, 2014;Almdahl et al, 2021). In the Stroop or Flanker tasks, participants are required to suppress interference due to stimulus competition or irrelevant information and need to resolve a conflicting representation arising from the cognitive level (Hung et al, 2018).…”

Brain Stimulation for Emotion Regulation in Adolescents With Psychiatric Disorders: Study Protocol for a Clinical-Transdiagnostical, Randomized, Triple-Blinded and Sham-Controlled Neurotherapeutic Trial

“…Single-subject analysis of the fMRI data will be conducted using the general linear model (GLM) as implemented in SPM12. The conditions will be modeled as previously described for the eSTROOP ( 120 ), e-nBACK ( 124 ) and the ERT [similar to ( 123 )]. Image-derived movement estimates and surrogates of physiological artifacts (heartbeat, breathing) will be used as covariates and regressed out.…”

“…The fMRI implementation of the e-nBACK task will only consist of a 2-back and an additional 0-back condition as control organized in a mixed design [similar to ( 120 )]. The conditions will be presented in eight blocks (four per condition) of 12 stimuli, where the pictures are shown for 2 s with 0.5 s between.…”

“…The fMRI adaptation of the eSTROOP task is taken from Alder et al ( 121 ) respectively, Almdahl et al ( 120 ): In short, 149 stimuli will be presented for 1 s each with jittered baseline periods of 3–5 s in an event-related manner. With additional baselines of 10 s at the beginning at end, the task will take ~13 min.…”

Effect of emotional stimulus on response inhibition in people with mild cognitive impairment: an event-related potential study

“…Existing studies focused on comparing older and young adults to explore the role of aging in influencing the process of emotion and response inhibition. Studies utilizing the emotional Stroop task, Stop-Signal task and Go/No-Go task found that healthy older adults with positive emotions had greater emotional response inhibition than younger adults ( Waring et al, 2019 ; Williams et al, 2020 ; Almdahl et al, 2021 ), and task-relevant happy information enhanced response inhibition in older adults. The older adults with pathologic cognitive impairment were not included in these studies.…”