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Accepted: 10 December 2021 / Published online: 6 January 2022
© The Author(s) 2022
Abstract
During cognitive reappraisal, an individual reinterprets the meaning of an emotional stimulus to regulate the intensity of their emotional response. Prefrontal cortex activity has been found to support reappraisal and is putatively thought to downregulate the amygdala response to these stimuli. The timing of these regulation-related responses during the course of a trial, however, remains poorly understood. In the current fMRI study, participants were instructed to view or reappraise negative images and then rate how negative they felt following each image. The hemodynamic response function was estimated in 11 regions of interest for the entire time course of the trial including image viewing and rating. Notably, within the amygdala there was no evidence of downregulation in the early (picture viewing) window of the trial, only in the late (rating) window, which also correlated with a behavioral measure of reappraisal success. With respect to the prefrontal regions, some (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus) showed reappraisal-related activation in the early window, whereas others (e.g., middle frontal gyrus) showed increased activation primarily in the late window. These results highlight the temporal dynamics of different brain regions during emotion regulation and suggest that the amygdala response to negative images need not be immediately dampened to achieve successful cognitive reappraisal.
Keywords Emotion regulation · Cognitive reappraisal · Amygdala · Prefrontal cortex · fMRI
Introduction
Emotion regulation allows an individual to define a goal state (e.g., to feel less sad), which can influence how emotional input is perceived and acted upon (Gross, 2015). One commonly studied regulation approach is cognitive reappraisal, which involves reinterpreting the meaning of a negative stimulus so that it is perceived as less unpleasant or salient (Buhle et al., 2014; Gross, 2015). Cognitive reappraisal is highly effective at reducing negative emotion both experimentally and clinically (Buhle et al., 2014; Gross & John, 2003; Ochsner et al., 2012). Many studies have investigated the mechanisms supporting this emotion regulation technique in healthy adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Findings have consistently identified increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), ventrolateral PFC/inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), medial PFC/anterior cingulate cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and the lateral temporal lobe and, less consistently, decreased activation in...