Doctoral Dissertation Research: Relations Between the Awareness and Differentiation of Emotional Experience and Activity in the Neural Circuitry of Emotion Regulation

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

What brain regions participate in the regulation of emotion? How do they interact? How does the ability to think about and describe one's emotional experience or mood in a specific and detailed way affect activity in these regions as well as the relative success of regulating an emotional response or mood? With National Science Foundation funding, Dr. Sharon L. Thompson-Schill will direct graduate student research in a study examining the role of specific brain regions (the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) during the conscious voluntary regulation of emotional responses to both neutral and unpleasant, negative pictures in healthy human participants. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides a measure of neural activity. Galvanic skin response (GSR), a peripheral psychophysiological measure, and self-reported measures of current emotional state are collected during fMRI scanning to confirm and measure the degree to which the emotion regulation manipulation is successful. Relations between neural activity and the physiological and self-report measures are tested. Emotion differentiation, or the degree to which emotional experience is parsed in a discrete, differentiated fashion, is assessed using a 14-day diary protocol with handheld computers in study participants after completion of the fMRI procedure. Greater emotion differentiation is hypothesized to provide additional emotion knowledge pertaining to the cause, context, bodily sensations, appropriate expressions, and action sequences associated with enhancing or reducing the emotional experience. Therefore, among individuals who experience negative affect at a similar intensity, those who differentiate their negative emotional experience into specific discrete emotions such as "fear" or "anger" are hypothesized to be better able to regulate their negative affect than those who simply describe a "bad feeling." Analysis of the relation between individual differences in emotion differentiation and ability to regulate emotion as indexed by the self-report, GSR, and fMRI data tests whether knowing exactly how one feels is associated with greater ability to modulate that feeling in a goal-appropriate manner. This study builds upon both (a) the investigators' previous finding that maintenance of an emotional response to unpleasant pictures is associated with a prolonged increase in amygdalar activity and (b) reported changes in amygdalar and prefrontal cortical activity during suppression of negative emotion, because both enhancement and suppression of negative emotion are examined in the same participants and is compared to a condition when no regulation is performed. Thus, brain regions displaying activity changes related to affective state changes can be dissociated from those displaying changes related to attempt to modulate affective state, providing information pertaining to the function of the circuitry components. Broader Impacts. This study tests whether greater differentiation of one's emotional experience on a daily basis is associated with greater ability to regulate emotional responses in a laboratory setting. Development of a model of the neurocircuitry of emotion regulation is critical for understanding normal emotional processes such as how the brain perceives and responds to affective stimuli and how it recognizes the actual experience of the emotion, as well as for developing appropriate treatments for psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety that are characterized by abnormal regulatory processes. In addition, it may also increase understanding of how the brain performs other self-regulatory processes. This project provides valuable graduate student training in the acquisition and analysis of self-report, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging data through its integration of both cognitive neuroscience and social psychological methods.