Neural correlates of using distancing to regulate emotional responses to social situations

Abstract

Cognitive reappraisal is a commonly used and highly adaptive strategy for emotion regulation that has been studied in healthy volunteers. Most studies to date have focused on forms of reappraisal that involve reinterpreting the meaning of stimuli and have intermixed social and non-social emotional stimuli. Here we examined the neural correlates of the regulation of negative emotion elicited by social situations using a less studied form of reappraisal known as distancing. Whole brain fMRI data were obtained as participants viewed aversive and neutral social scenes with instructions to either simply look at and respond naturally to the images or to downregulate their emotional responses by distancing. Three key findings were obtained accompanied with the reduced aversive response behaviorally. First, across both instruction types, aversive social images activated the amygdala. Second, across both image types, distancing activated the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), intraparietal sulci (IPS), and middle/superior temporal gyrus (M/STG). Third, when distancing one's self from aversive images, activity increased in dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), lateral prefrontal cortex, precuneus and PCC, IPS, and M/STG, meanwhile, and decreased in the amygdala. These findings demonstrate that distancing from aversive social cues modulates amygdala activity via engagement of networks implicated in social perception, perspective-taking, and attentional allocation.

Effects of emotion regulation strategy on brain responses to the valence and social content of visual scenes

“…Such a design is likely to induce greater modulations of prefrontal regions with sustained activity related to top-down control, as opposed to sensory-driven regions involved in bottom-up perceptual processing. Another possibility is that in many other studies, instructions for the "natural" condition required participants to simply "look" at the pictures (Kim & Hamann, 2007;Koenigsberg et al, 2010;Mak et al, 2009;Ochsner et al, 2002;Ochsner, Ray et al, 2004), whereas we also asked participants to imagine that the situation could be experienced in reality, which may imply a first person perspective with personal involvement. Thus, our NAT conditions could actually have led to up-regulation attempts, which were treated as a different ER condition in some studies (e.g., "increase" strategy, see Ochsner, Ray et al, 2004).…”

“…Although exposure times of 2 s or even less are standard in fMRI research involving emotional stimuli and effective to activate relevant brain structures (e.g., Britton et al, 2006;Goossens et al, 2009;Hariri et al, 2002;Norris et al, 2004), may paradigms in the field of emotion regulation have employed longer picture viewing times (e.g., Beauregard et al, 2001;Kim & Hamann, 2007;Koenigsberg et al, 2010;Levesque et al, 2003;Mak et al, 2009;Ochsner et al, 2002;Ochsner, Ray et al, 2004). However, in contrast to these investigations where regulation strategies alternate on a trial-by-trial basis and hence require the search for imagespecific adjustments (e.g., re-interpretations during REAP), here we applied a blocked design where regulation could be implemented in a more sustained manner (as already used elsewhere, e.g., Harenski & Hamann, 2006;Phan et al, 2005) and was guided by controlled instructions (e.g., "pretend unreal" for the REAP strategy) for all stimulus conditions and all participants.…”

“…Firstly, most of the previous brain imaging studies on ER have investigated only one type of ER strategy at a time (Beauregard, Levesque, & Bourgouin, 2001;Kim & Hamann, 2007;Koenigsberg et al, 2010;Levesque et al, 2003;Ochsner et al, 2002;Ochsner, Ray et al, 2004), except for one study (Goldin et al, 2008) that compared REAP and ESUP in a single experimental design but focused on difference in the time-course of ER effects. Hence, still very little is known about the differential impact of REAP and ESUP on brain activity during emotional processing, particularly in relation to different stimulus types.…”

“…One exception is a recent investigation by Koenigsberg and colleagues where the authors used social negative images exclusively in a cognitive re-evaluation (REAP) paradigm (Koenigsberg et al, 2010). Yet, this study did not compare brain activations elicited by social negative to comparable nonsocial negative scenes.…”

“…We predicted changes in activations related to the differential encoding of valence (negative vs. positive) and/or stimulus content (social vs. nonsocial) in brain networks that are selectively tuned to social and affective information (Lieberman, 2007), including in particular the amygdala which has previously been shown to be sensitive to social cues (Britton et al, 2006;Frewen et al, 2010;Goossens et al, 2009;Hariri et al, 2002;Norris et al, 2004;Sander et al, 2005;Scharpf et al, 2010;Vrtička et al, 2008) and modulated by different ER strategies (Killgore & Yurgelun-Todd, 2005;Kim & Hamann, 2007;Koenigsberg et al, 2010;Levesque et al, 2003;Ochsner et al, 2002;Ochsner, Ray et al, 2004). Other differences were expected in prefrontal cortical areas that have been implicated in controlling emotion processing during different ER strategies (Goldin et al, 2008;Kim & Hamann, 2007;Levesque et al, 2003;Ochsner et al, 2002;Ochsner, Ray et al, 2004).…”