Neural correlates of using distancing to regulate emotional responses to social situations |
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Authors: | Harold W Koenigsberg Jin Fan Xun Liu Scott Pizzarello Lucia Tecuta Marianne Goodman Antonia New Larry J Siever |
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Institution: | a Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, United States b James J Peters VA Medical Center, Bronx, NY, United States c Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States d University of Florida, Tallahasse, FL, United States |
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Abstract: | Cognitive reappraisal is a commonly used and highly adaptive strategy for emotion regulation that has been studied in healthy volunteers. Most studies to date have focused on forms of reappraisal that involve reinterpreting the meaning of stimuli and have intermixed social and non-social emotional stimuli. Here we examined the neural correlates of the regulation of negative emotion elicited by social situations using a less studied form of reappraisal known as distancing. Whole brain fMRI data were obtained as participants viewed aversive and neutral social scenes with instructions to either simply look at and respond naturally to the images or to downregulate their emotional responses by distancing. Three key findings were obtained accompanied with the reduced aversive response behaviorally. First, across both instruction types, aversive social images activated the amygdala. Second, across both image types, distancing activated the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), intraparietal sulci (IPS), and middle/superior temporal gyrus (M/STG). Third, when distancing one's self from aversive images, activity increased in dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), lateral prefrontal cortex, precuneus and PCC, IPS, and M/STG, meanwhile, and decreased in the amygdala. These findings demonstrate that distancing from aversive social cues modulates amygdala activity via engagement of networks implicated in social perception, perspective-taking, and attentional allocation. |
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Keywords: | Emotion Cognitive reappraisal Social cognitive neuroscience Emotional distancing Emotion regulation fMRI |
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