Automatic adaptive emotion regulation is associated with lower emotion-related activation in the frontoparietal cortex and other cortical regions with multi-componential organization

Abstract

Although some researchers consider automatic adaptive emotion regulation to be an automatized strategy whereas others consider it to be implicit disengagement of deliberative process, to date, its neural correlates have been poorly investigated. In addition, the valence specificity of automatic adaptive emotion regulation and levels of activation relative to the neutral condition are controversial; the former is relevant to the attribution of resilient emotion regulation to positivity bias or emotional stability, and the latter to determining whether regulation is based on emotion-specific or emotion-non-specific processes. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we presented positive and negative emotional pictures to healthy young participants and investigated the neural correlates of automatic adaptive emotion regulation in spontaneous emotional response. A significant negative trait effect (i.e., regression coefficient) on activation was identified both for positive and negative emotional responses in various cortical regions. A cluster analysis identified three clusters among these regions based on the valence specificity of the trait effect and level of activation relative to neutral stimuli. Cluster 1 included regions in the sensorimotor cortex characterized by negative emotion-specific decreases in activation relative to neutral stimuli in adaptive individuals. Cluster 2 included several cortical regions including the bilateral dorsal executive network, anterior cingulate, and inferior frontal gyrus, which were characterized by valence-independent decreases in activation in adaptive individuals. Cluster 3 included the bilateral ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, right insula, and other posterior regions, which were characterized by increased activation for negative stimuli in non-adaptive individuals. These findings support the assumption that automatic adaptive emotion regulation involves the implicit disengagement of deliberative process and suggest the relevance of different cortical networks to the potential emotion- and valence-specificity of adaptive regulation.