The impact of self-distancing on emotion explosiveness and accumulation: An fMRI study

Abstract

Emotions unfold over time with episodes differing in explosiveness (i.e., profiles having a steep vs. a gentle start) and accumulation (i.e., profiles increasing over time vs. going back to baseline). In the present fMRI study, we wanted to replicate and extend previous findings on the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Specifically, we aimed to: (a) replicate the finding that different neural mechanisms are associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation, (b) replicate the finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective decreases emotion explosiveness and accumulation at the level of self-report, and (c) examine whether adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective similarly modulates activity in the brain regions associated with emotion explosiveness and accumulation. Participants in an fMRI scanner were asked to adopt a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective while reading and thinking about negative social feedback, and to report on felt changes in negative affect during that period using an emotion intensity profile tracking approach. We replicated previous findings showing that emotion explosiveness and accumulation were related to activity in regions involved in self-referential processing (such as the medial prefrontal cortex) and sustained visceral arousal (such as the posterior insula), respectively. The finding that adopting a self-distanced (vs. self-immersed) perspective lowers emotion explosiveness and accumulation was also replicated at a self-report level. However, perspective taking did not impact activity in the neural correlates of emotion explosiveness and accumulation.

Emotion Regulation by Psychological Distance and Level of Abstraction: Two Meta-Analyses

“…The study used a dependent variable for which we could not compute a comparable effect size. 11 These cases included standardized residuals (Libby et al, 2011, Studies 4–5), emotion-intensity profile (Résibois, Rotge, et al, 2018; Résibois, Kuppens, et al, 2018), and proportion of yes responses (McGraw & Warren, 2010, Study 5) as dependent variables.…”

Are reactions to frustrative nonreward in other animals a model for human anger? Neurobehavioral implications and therapeutic applications.

“…The temporal trajectory of such persistence has been identified in three quite different quantitative models which found that anger intensity rises quickly and falls slowly. Two of these models were based on adults’ subjective reports (Hoeksma et al, 2007; Résibois, Rotgé, et al, 2018); the third involved parent reported angry behavior of children during tantrums (Potegal & Qiu, 2010; Qiu et al, 2009).…”

Default and Control networks connectivity dynamics track the stream of affect at multiple timescales

“…Indeed, over the last years, increasing attention has been dedicated to the study of the temporal characteristics of affect using behavioral and experience sampling methods (Trampe et al, 2015; Verduyn et al, 2015; Kuppens et al, 2010), which allow researchers to track emotions over days, weeks or months. In sharp contrast, studies on the brain correlates of affective dynamics are still limited (Waugh and Schirillo, 2012; Costa et al, 2014; Verduyn et al, 2015; Résibois et al, 2017; 2018) and have employed static or relatively brief stimuli (Posner et al, 2009; Baucom et al, 2012; Kim et al, 2017) that may not be adequate to account for the complex temporal trajectory of lifelike experiences (Waugh and Schirillo, 2012).…”