Cognitive control of emotion
neurocoachsa.wordpress.com
Translational Neuromodeling &
Computational Neuroeconomics Seminar
13.12.2013
Daniel Renz
Examples
A person with social anxiety clenches her hands
to avoid shaking as she tries to answer a
professor's question.
bbc.co.uk
A person with alcohol dependence drinks himself
into oblivion following a bitter divorce.
medindia.net
A person with obsessive-compulsive disorder
feels intense anxiety and washes his hands until
they bleed.
wikipedia.org
A person with depression fights back tears during
an unpleasant work meeting.
pensionriskmatters.com
What do those people have in common?
Examples
A person with social anxiety clenches her hands
to avoid shaking as she tries to answer a
professor's question.
bbc.co.uk
A person with alcohol dependence drinks himself
into oblivion following a bitter divorce.
medindia.net
A person with obsessive-compulsive disorder
feels intense anxiety and washes his hands until
they bleed.
wikipedia.org
A person with depression fights back tears during
an unpleasant work meeting.
pensionriskmatters.com
What do those people have in common?
• experience of high levels of negative emotion
• trying to suppress this experience
Suppression is one of many strategies.
Emotion regulation and psychopathology
• Problems with emotion (regulation) characterize more than 75% of the
diagnostic categories of psychopathology in DSM-IV.
• The mood and anxiety disorders are even primarily defined on the basis of
disturbed emotions (and their control).
• We use the process model of emotion regulation to organize research on
strategies of emotion regulation.
• We then use this framework to examine diverse forms of psychopathology
Emotion regulation - Intro
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the
thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to
revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius, last of the Five Good Emperors
psychologicalscience.org
• Emotions have been said to represent the “wisdom of the ages” (Lazarus, 1991).
• But even the wisest guides have their limits.
• Regulation of emotion necessary for successful adaptive behavior. It has been
conceptualized as processes through which individuals modulate their emotions
either consciously or unconsciously.
• Conscious emotion regulation allows us to interact with our complex environment in a
goal-directed manner.
• Emotion regulation is maladaptive when it does not change the emotional response in
the desired way or when the long-term costs outweigh the benefits of short-term
emotional changes.
History of emotion regulation
• Roots in psychoanalytic theorizing about the nature of psychological
defenses (Psychodynamic study of defense - Breuer & Freud, 1895). Study of
regulation of negative emotions using individual difference studies of socalled perceptual defenses.
• Stress and coping tradition (Lazarus, 1966). Focus on management of
situations that tax or exceed the individual's resources.
• Developmental study of self-regulation with roots in socio-emotional
development. For example, it was shown that children can obtain a preferred
but delayed reward by imagining a kind of metal frame around an
immediately available treat.
• Contemporary research builds on these foundations using both behavioral
and neuroscience methods to investigate cellular responses to stress or the
neural systems involved in simple forms of affective learning.
• Only very recently, rapid growth of imaging studies of regulatory phenomena
in humans has allowed study of regulatory power of higher cognitive control
processes on emotion. This 'hot' control of emotion draws on models of the
'cold' control of attention and memory.
Modal model of emotion
Emotion is a somewhat elusive, but we can describe a prototypical response.
• triggered by a psychologically relevant situation (internal or external)
• no emotion occurs without attention to situation.
• situations are appraised for their bearing on one's currently active goals.
• appraisal sets in motion an elaborated response across these systems:
• experiential (“feeling”)
• behavioral (e.g. smiling, eyes widening)
• physiological (autonomic and neuroendocrine changes)
Modal model of emotion
Emotion is a somewhat elusive, but we can describe a prototypical response.
• triggered by a psychologically relevant situation (internal or external)
• no emotion occurs without attention to situation.
• situations are appraised for their bearing on one's currently active goals.
• appraisal sets in motion an elaborated response across these systems:
• experiential (“feeling”)
• behavioral (e.g. smiling, eyes widening)
• physiological (autonomic and neuroendocrine changes)
A simple way to describe those core features is the “modal model” of emotion.
Situation
Attention
Appraisal
Response
Process model of emotion regulation
Selection /
Modification
Situation
Deployment
Attention
Cognitive Change
Appraisal
Modulation
Response
Experiential
Behavioral
Physiological
Example: Before an exam...
• The night before, study with other nervous students or meet a friend for relaxed
dinner (situation selection)
• When friend asks exam, you might choose not to talk about it (situation modification)
• When friend persists, count ceiling tiles (attentional deployment)
• You attach a meaning to the test “it's only a test” rather than seeing it as measuring
your value as a human being (cognitive change)
• After having miserably, you hide your embarrassment (response modulation)
Process model of emotion regulation
Selection /
Modification
Situation
Deployment
Attention
Cognitive Change
Appraisal
Modulation
Response
Experiential
Behavioral
Physiological
We will focus on down-regulation of negative emotion using strategies from the
families of attentional deployment, cognitive change and response modulation.
Situation selection & modification
• Selection / Avoidance of situation based on prediction of emotional experience
• Depression: enjoyment of an event is consistently underestimated.
• Avoidant personality disorder: Maladaptive chronic use of avoidance.
• Situation modification
• OCD: person goes to germ-filled public restroom, but can use paper towels.
• SAD: Implementation of safety behaviors in SAD attributes non-occurance of
feared results to safety behaviors (instead of the safety of the situation).
Attentional deployment
Redirection of attention within a given situation (Selection of “internal situation”).
Can modulate all behavioral and neural responses that are conscious.
Example strategies: selective attention, rumination, worry, distraction.
Mindfulness therapy: brings awareness into the present, by focusing attention nonevaluatively, non-personalized into the present moment.
Attentional deployment
Selective attention
Task: Judging either emotional or perceptual features of emotional stimuli.
Results: Discrepant results of amygdala modulation. Studies suggest both decreases in
amygdala activation when attending emotional features as well as invariant amygdala
activity.
Explanation: (a) Some judgments might impose greater attentional load, which limits
processing of perceptual input and thus limits amygdala responses. (b) In some cases,
participants might actively regulate their responses.
Attentional distraction
Task: Use distracting secondary task to limit attention to pain.
Results: Distraction diminishes the aversiveness of pain, reduces activity in (sub)cortical
pain-related regions (midcingulate, insula, thalamus, periacqueductal gray) and activates
regions related to cognitive control (OFC, ACC, medial and lateral PFC).
Summary
Context and mechanisms governing regulatory effect are not clear. Problems: Different
stimulus types. Absence of behavioral and physiological measures of regulation.
Cognitive change
A situation gives only rise to emotions if judged as important to one's goals (appraisal).
Reappraisal
May change (1) appraisals related to the situation (toddler vs working person: references
to self) and (2) appraisals related to one's emotional responses (according to beliefs
about which emotions are ok - “I hate myself when I get anxious”)
Unwillingness to experience negative emotions and subsequent attempts to avoid
feelings such as anxiety or depression maintains psychopathology through secondary
responses: “recursive emotional response”, “dirty emotions” or natural negativity vs
negative negativity (buddhism).
Decreases emotion experience and behavioral expression, and has no impact on
memory.
First evidence that reappraisal-like processes could influence emotional responding was
provided by Lazarus et al in 1966. Students were shown a filmed circumcision ritual, with
and without an accompanying soundtrack that was designed to minimize emotional
impact. Participants who heard the soundtrack had more pleasant mood ratings.
Cognitive change
Reappraisal of negative emotion activates dorsal ACC and PFC (selection and application
of reappraisal strategies) and modulates activity in amygdala / insula in accordance with
the goal of reappraisal. The precise areas in PFC change with the task.
Cognitive change
If participants believe that placebo blunts pain, then painful stimuli elicit less pain and
produce decreased activation of amygdala and pain-related cingulate, insula and
thalamus as well as increased activation of lateral and medial PFC related to cognitive
control (including dorsal and right vlPFC). This is strikingly similar to what happens during
reappraisal, suggesting that placebo effects are mediated by the active maintenance of
beliefs about the compounds.
Studies of cognitive change have shown consistently that emotional appraisal systems
can be modulated by PFC, OFC and cingulate control systems. Subcortical regions such
as the amygdala are constantly implicated in the appraisal.
Cognitive change
Controlled regulation
So how do those control systems regulate appraisal system activation?
Patterns of functional specificity are being discovered:
• Ventral PFC and OFC systems may evaluate the context-appropriate emotional value
of stimuli and select actions on the basis of those evaluations. This might directly affect
emotional associations through direct reciprocal connections with amygdala and Nacc.
Through those connections the appraisal systems could also affect goal-directed
behavior.
• Dorsal PFC (which has few, if any, direct connections to appraisal systems) may be
used to explicitly reason about how associations between stimuli and emotional
responses can be changed. This may indirectly affect emotional associations by
biasing processing in the ventral PFC or in perceptual / sensory memory systems.
Response modulation
Occurs after response tendencies have been initiated. Influences experiential, behavioral
and physiological responding as directly as possible.
• Expressive suppression (Inhibiting the outward signs of inner feelings)
• Decreases subjective experience of positive emotion. Has no (or amplifying)
effect on the subjective experience of negative emotion. (it is not clear why)
• Produces deleterious biological and cognitive effects such as increased
sympathetic nervous system activation and impaired memory.
•
•
Experiential avoidance/suppression
•
efforts to inhibit the emotion experience itself (unwillingness to accept one's
authentic experience)
•
maintains many mood and anxiety disorders
Acceptance: Allowing the rise and passage of emotions without attempts to avoid or
control them.
Cognitive change vs Response modulation:
Affective consequences
Short film showed an arm amputation to elicit disgust.
Three groups of participants: reappraise (to not feel anything), suppress (hide emotions),
and control.
Measurement of finger pulse amplitude as indication of sympathetic activation.
Both reappraisal and suppression decreased disgust-expressive behavior.
Only suppression additionally led to increased sympathetic system activation.
Only reappraisal decreased disgust experience.
Gross2002
Cognitive change vs Response modulation:
Affective consequences
Self-assessment using Emotion Regulation Questionnaire:
• individuals who habitually suppress have lesser emotion-expressive behavior
• they have comparable levels of negative emotion experience, but lesser positive
emotion experience
• reappraisal is associated with greater positive emotion experience / expression and
lesser negative emotion experience / expression
Cognitive change vs Response modulation:
Cognitive consequences
• Suppression leads to impaired memory while reappraisal does not. Can this be
explained by the constant cognitive required to suppress, leaving little resources for
processing of events in order to commit to memory?
• In one study, participants were shown a short film clip known to elicit negative emotion.
Suppression led to decrements in objective memory and memory confidence rating in
a surprise cued-recognition test afterwards.
• In another study, participants viewed slides that either elicited high or low levels of
negative emotion. Suppression participants performed worse on verbal memory test
(indifferent of emotional content), but normally on the nonverbal memory test. This
suggests that the cognitive costs of suppression are due to verbal demands of selfinstructions issues during suppression.
Cognitive change vs Response modulation:
Social consequences
Requirement of monitoring facial expressions and vocal signals could make the
individual less responsive to the emotional cues of their partner. So suppression should
have negative social consequences in casual conversation, and reappraisal less so.
Unacquainted pairs of women watched an upsetting film, and then discussed their
reactions. One member of each dyad had been asked to either suppress, reappraise,
or interact naturally with her conversation partner.
Interacting with a partner who shows little positive emotion, and who is unresponsive to
emotional cues, is more physiologically activating than interacting with a partner who
shows greater positive emotion and responsiveness.
Habitually, suppression is also
associated with poorer social
support. Individuals who tended
to use reappraisal were more
likely to be liked than individuals
who tended to use suppression
(questionnaire data).
Gross2002
Neuroimaging results
• Regulation of negative affect involves the medial and lateral prefrontal and the
parietal cortex.
• Appraisal involves subcortical areas, especially the amygdala.
• Regulatory influences on amygdala
• pgACC inhibits in the resolution of emotional conflicts
• OFC modulates in the reappraisal of contextual values
• lmPFC and dmPFC modulate in reducing negative emotion, possibly mediated
by OFC / vmPFC.
• The main brain areas involved in cognitive emotion regulation (especially amygdala),
appear to be dysfunctional in depression.
• Elevated baseline activity of the amygdala associated with symptom severity
• heightened amygdala responsivity to affective stimuli
• ineffective functioning of the dlPFC, which may result in a reduced regulatory
influence on amygdala activation in response to an emotional challenge, which
might be expressed phenomenologically as perseveration of negative affect
and rumination.
Temporal dynamics of detachment
in MDD
Task: 120 pictures (60 negative, 60 neutral) were shown for 8s each. Instruction
'permit' or 'regulate' for 2s before. Instruction 'relax' for 20s afterwards. 15 min later,
stimuli were presented again in a passive viewing task (each picture 1s).
• Both groups showed amygdala activation in response to negative pictures, which
was significantly reduced during regulation.
• Ability to down-regulate negative emotions
and corresponding amygdala activation
were anti-correlated with HAM-D scores.
Erk2010
Temporal dynamics of detachment
in MDD
• Healthy controls showed right DLPFC and inferior parietal cortex (IPL) activation
during regulation, which was diminished in patients.
• Healthy controls showed a sustained regulation effect in the amygdala after 15 min
delay.
Erk2010
Failure to regulate in MDD
Task: 144 pictures (72 pleasant, 72 unpleasant) were shown for 10s each. After 4s,
a signal was given to either enhance, suppress or continue. Pupil dilation as
measure of autonomic arousal.
• In response to negative stimuli, healthy controls showed left-lateralized activation
in PFC when downregulating and an inverse relationship between activation in
left vlPFC and the amygdala, mediated by vmPFC. Increased effort as reflected
in greater pupil dilation was associated with decreased activation in amygdala
and insula (successful downregulation).
• Depressed individuals showed bilateral PFC activation and a (counterproductive)
positive association between vmPFC and amygdala. Pupil dilation was strongly
positively correlated with activation in amygdala and insula. This suggests that
the effortful attempt to reappraise negative stimuli was ineffective or
counterproductive in the depressed group.
• It seems that the role of vmPFC as an inhibitory link between left vlPFC and the
amygdala is compromised in depression.
Failure to regulate in MDD
5-HTTLPR polymorphism
5-HTTLPR polymorphism of the human serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene SLC6A4
has been shown to influence transcriptional activity of 5-HTT. Short allele carriers have
altered amygdala reactivity and lack of prefrontal regulatory control. Specifically:
• increased anxiety-related traits and elevated risk of depression
• increased amygdala reactivity
• Reduced structural covariance between pgACC and amygdala
• reduced gray matter volume in ACC and. Rostral sgACC was the maximum reduction
within the whole brain
• reduction of functional connection between Amygdala and pgACC. This connectivity
was predictive of a measure of anxious temperament based on the Tridimensional
Personality Questionnaire.
Importantly, this study showed that: amygdala connections to vmPFC, which may also
participate in regulating amygdala activity, if they exist at all, are sparse. Thus, the
previously reported finding of increased functional connectivity in s allele carriers in this
region is likely based on indirect anatomical interconnections.
5-HTTLPR polymorphism
Pezawas2005
Journal club…
JC: Individual differences
•
Reciprocal PFC-amygdala relationship during successful reappraisal of negative emotion suggests that greater
regulatory ability is correlated with better engagement of the PFC-amygdala circuit.
•
Individual differences in the capacity to regulate my determine vulnerability in the face of adversity.
•
One of the best validated measures of negative emotion is facial EMG over frowning muscles (cEMG). In other
studies: Measure of regulatory success through self-reported negative affect or non-specific physiological arousal
(pupil dilation, skin conductance). cEMG has been shown to reflect specifically negative effect, be modulated by
regulatory activity and have a high test-retest reliability over a four-week interval.
•
Which PFC areas critically impact regulatory success? vlPFC, vmPFC, dlPFC, dmPFC, OFC, ACC?
Study investigated only males, as their emotion regulation over
time is more stable.
Regulation instructions: enhance, suppress or maintain.
Participants were allowed to choose reappraisal strategies, but
were instructed to avoid non-cognitive strategies such as
breathing or gaze aversion.
Individual difference results (1)
• negative emotion was elicited by pictures as shown by greater cEMG activity nd higher
amygdala activation for negative versus neutral images during maintain condition.
• cEMG and amygdala were modulated by regulation conditions.
• ability to down-regulate as measured by cEMG was predictive of amygdala BOLD about
1.3 years later (up-regulation not significant!).
Individual difference results (2)
• Functional connectivity was assessed using psychophysiological interaction method.
• Results: down-regulatory ability predictive of PFC-amygdala connectivity: cEMG
difference score was regressed voxel-wise on function connectivity of amygdala.
Greater capacity for down-regulation was associated with greater inverse functional
coupling between amygdala and pgACC, OFC, dmPFC and dlPFC. OFC was not
modulated by regulation instructions. Individuals who were worse at regulation showed
more positive coupling.
Individual difference discussion
• trait-like ability to regulate negative emotion is associated with modulation of the
amygdala activity and with amygdala-PFC function connectivity.
• individual-difference analysis revealed a new set of large clusters in PFC.
• OFC not statistically significant at the group-mean level. This suggests that OFC was
recruited in individuals who where particularly successful in decreasing amygdala
activities.
• Banks2007 showed effects in the opposite direction! In Banks2007, negative emotion
was self-reported. Regulatory success was self-reported too, but not used in
connectivity analysis.
• Did not find stable associations for up-regulation. Reasons: Men show lower cEMG
activity to negative pictures compared to women (limited range). Studies have shown
that regulation during picture viewing produces higher effects than regulation
afterwards, and the stimuli were presented for a different time scale in fMRI.
• For the future: How is the CAUSAL connectivity?
Additional material...
Cognitive control center: PFC
dlPFC is involved with "on-line" processing of
information such as integrating different
dimensions of cognition and behaviour (planning,
working memory, abstract thinking, ...)
OFC plays a key role in impulse control,
maintenance of set, monitoring ongoing behaviour
and socially appropriate behaviours
ACC is involved in emotional drives, experience
and integration (inhibition, motivation, decisionmaking,...)
Theories of PFC
Dynamic Filtering Theory (Shimamura):
PFC is presumed to act as a high-level filter that enhances goal-directed activations and
inhibits irrelevant activations. This filter enables executive control at various levels of
processing, including selecting, maintaining, updating, and rerouting activations. It has
also been used to explain emotional regulation.
The OFC is heavily connected to sensory and limbic areas and therefore may be
responsible for filtering neural activity associated with emotional response.
Integrative Theory of PFC function (Miller and Cohen):
Cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the
prefrontal cortex that represents goals and means to achieve them. They provide bias
signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of activity along
neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and
outputs needed to perform a given task.
Miller showed that PFC neurons represent abstract rules such as "same vs. different",
process the category or quantity of visual stimuli, or guide the allocation of attentional
resources. PFC activity has also been shown to reflect the flexible remapping of stimulusresponse associations.
Neural components of emotions
Amygdala: Critical for detecting what parts of our surroundings have emotional significance. Generates biobehavioral adjustments. Critical for the production of emotion, especially fear.
Hypothalamus: Synthesizing and releasing neurotransmitters which can effect mood, reward and arousal.
Anterior cingulate cortex: May be important for subjective emotional awareness, may play an important role in the
initiation of motivated behavior.
Basal ganglia: motivation.
OFC: Decision-making and influence by emotion on that decision.
PFC: Regulation of emotion and behavior by anticipating the consequences of our actions (goal-directed).
Nucleus accumbens: Involved in the experience of goal-directed positive emotion.
Insula: Bodily experience of emotion. Especially important for disgust.