Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 57, Issue 3, 1 February 2005, Pages 210-219
Biological Psychiatry

Original articles
Neural substrates for voluntary suppression of negative affect: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2004.10.030Get rights and content

Background

Successful control of affect partly depends on the capacity to modulate negative emotional responses through the use of cognitive strategies. Although the capacity to regulate emotions is critical to mental well-being, its neural substrates remain unclear.

Methods

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to ascertain brain regions involved in the voluntary regulation of emotion and whether dynamic changes in negative emotional experience can modulate their activation. Fourteen healthy subjects were scanned while they either maintained the negative affect evoked by highly arousing and aversive pictures (e.g., experience naturally) or suppressed their affect using cognitive reappraisal. In addition to a condition-based analysis, online subjective ratings of intensity of negative affect were used as covariates of brain activity.

Results

Inhibition of negative affect was associated with activation of dorsal anterior cingulate, dorsal medial prefrontal, and lateral prefrontal cortices, and attenuation of brain activity within limbic regions (e.g., nucleus accumbens/extended amygdala). Furthermore, activity within dorsal anterior cingulate was inversely related to intensity of negative affect, whereas activation of the amygdala was positively covaried with increasing negative affect.

Conclusions

These findings highlight a functional dissociation of corticolimbic brain responses, involving enhanced activation of prefrontal cortex and attenuation of limbic areas, during volitional suppression of negative emotion.

Section snippets

Subjects

Fourteen healthy, right-handed subjects (6 men, aged 22–38 years, mean 27.6 ± 4.4 years) participated in the study. The participants had normal or corrected-normal vision and were without a history of psychiatric or neurologic illness, as verified by a semistructured clinical interview. All subjects gave written informed consent after explanation of the experimental protocol, as approved by the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Human Investigation Committee.

Stimuli and behavioral protocol

The stimulus set consisted

Behavioral results

All subjects were debriefed following their scanning session and reported compliance with both “Maintain” and “Suppress” instructions. Each subject reviewed the pictures postscan, and none of the subjects reported having to close their eyes or resort to thinking irrelevant thoughts. Furthermore, they all reported that they were able to use the reappraisal strategies practiced before scanning; examples were provided by each subject to confirm their use of cognitive manipulation of the content of

Discussion

This fMRI study of emotion regulation is one of the first to examine the neural substrates involved in the voluntary suppression of negative affect and the relationship between these substrates and subjective, individual emotional experience. Several findings emerged that both extend and are consistent with recent observations from similar studies on the functional neuroanatomy of emotion regulation (Beauregard et al 2001; Levesque et al 2003; Ochsner et al 2002). The behavioral results show

Conclusions

In conclusion, we present functional imaging evidence that the voluntary regulation of negative emotion by appraisal engages the dorsal anterior cingulate, medial prefrontal, and lateral prefrontal cortices, a neural circuit responsible for higher order executive functions such as cognitive control of behavior. We also showed that ongoing changes in intensity of negative affect during emotion regulation (e.g., relative success or failure) are mediated by activity within the dorsal ACC and

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