Thinking and Feeling

Abstract

Calculating math problems from memory may seem unrelated to everyday processing of emotions, but they have more in common than one might think. Prior research highlights the importance of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in executive control, intentional emotion regulation, and experience of dysfunctional mood and anxiety. While it has been hypothesized that emotion regulation may be related to ‘cold’ (ie. not emotion-related) executive control, this assertion has not been tested. We address this gap by providing evidence that greater dlPFC activity during ‘cold’ executive control is associated with increased use of cognitive reappraisal to regulate emotions in everyday life. We then demonstrate that in the presence of increased life stress, increased dlPFC activity is associated with lower mood and anxiety symptoms and clinical diagnoses. Collectively, our results encourage ongoing efforts to understand prefrontal executive control as a possible intervention target for improving emotion regulation in mood and anxiety disorders.

Changes in Functional Connectivity following Treatment with Emotion Regulation Therapy

“…In these studies, increased connectivity between the PCC and DLPFC was associated with post-treatment PTSD symptoms (King et al, 2016) and reduced serum inflammatory markers (Creswell et al, 2016). Similarly, increased DLPFC function has also been associated with reappraisal (Ochsner et al, 2002;Scult et al, 2017b), and with decreased anxiety (Scult et al, 2017a). The present results also found a trend for this increase in PCC-premotor/DLPFC connectivity to parallel decreases in MDD severity and depression distress, and increases in attentional control and emotion regulation.…”

Performance and belief-based emotion regulation capacity and tendency: Mapping links with cognitive flexibility and perceived stress

“…Although prior work has linked executive functions such as cognitive flexibility and working memory (Scult et al, 2017) to reappraisal, we found that cognitive flexibility was not significantly related with either facet of reappraisal, while working memory was related with capacity. The latter finding replicates prior work while the former does not.…”

“…It follows that if working memory is compromised, then the ability to skillfully deploy other executive functions implicated in reappraisal is also likely reduced. Prior work supports this notion, showing that individual differences in working memory track with cognitive reappraisal (Schmeichel, Volokhov, & Demaree, 2008;Scult, Knodt, Swartz, Brigidi, & Hariri, 2017).…”

“…In other words, reappraisal 'quantity' might matter more than reappraisal 'quality.' Moreover, our findings make an important contribution to the recent discussion about how bolstering executive function may enhance emotion regulation (Cohen & Mor, 2017;Scult et al, 2017). Generally, because executive function may have a causal role in emotion regulation success (Cohen & Mor, 2017), there has been optimism that training it may help bolster emotion regulation and, consequently, wellbeing outcomes.…”

“…Another possible reason may be because of differences in sample size and heterogeneity-we sampled over one hundred individuals from an ethnically diverse population of college undergraduates, whereas other studies report smaller, community samples (e.g., McRae et al, 2012) or larger, less ethnically diverse samples (e.g., Scult et al, 2017).…”