Article

Emotion Regulation (ER) includes different mechanisms aiming at volitionally
modulating emotional responses, including cognitive re-evaluation (re-appraisal;
REAP) or inhibition of emotion expression and behavior (expressive suppression;
ESUP). However, despite the importance of these ER strategies, previous
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have not sufficiently
disentangled the specific neural impact of REAP versus ESUP on brain responses to
different kinds of emotion-eliciting events. Moreover, although different effects
have been reported for stimulus valence (positive vs. negative), no study has
systematically investigated how ER may change emotional processing as a function
of particular stimulus content variables (i.e., social vs. nonsocial). Our fMRI
study directly compared brain activation to visual scenes during the use of
different ER strategies, relative to a "natural" viewing condition, but also
examined the effects of ER as a function of the social versus nonsocial content
of scenes, in addition to their negative versus positive valence (by manipulating
these factors orthogonally in a 2x2 factorial design). Our data revealed that
several prefrontal cortical areas were differentially recruited during either
REAP or ESUP, independent of the valence and content of images. In addition,
selective modulations by either REAP or ESUP were found depending on the negative
valence of scenes (medial fusiform gyrus, anterior insula, dmPFC), and on their
nonsocial (middle insula) or social (bilateral amygdala, mPFC, posterior
cingulate) significance. Furthermore, we observed a significant lateralization in
the amygdala for the effect of the two different ER strategies, with a
predominant modulation by REAP on the left side but by ESUP on the right side.
Taken together, these results do not only highlight the distributed nature of
neural changes induced by ER, but also reveal the specific impact of different
strategies (REAP or ESUP), and the specific sites implicated by different
dimensions of emotional information (social or negative).
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Langue : ANGLAIS