Getting Over It: Long-Lasting Effects of Emotion Regulation on Amygdala Response

Abstract

Little is known about whether emotion regulation can have lasting effects on the ability of a stimulus to continue eliciting affective responses in the future. We addressed this issue in this study. Participants cognitively reappraised negative images once or four times, and then 1 week later, they passively viewed old and new images, so that we could identify lasting effects of prior reappraisal. As in prior work, active reappraisal increased prefrontal responses but decreased amygdala responses and self-reported emotion. At 1 week, amygdala responses remained attenuated for images that had been repeatedly reappraised compared with images that had been reappraised once, new control images, and control images that had been seen as many times as reappraised images but had never been reappraised. Prefrontal activation was not selectively elevated for repeatedly reappraised images and was not related to long-term attenuation of amygdala responses. These results suggest that reappraisal can exert long-lasting "dose-dependent" effects on amygdala response that may cause lasting changes in the neural representation of an unpleasant event's emotional value.

Keywords: amygdala; emotion regulation; fMRI; long-term effects; reappraisal.

© The Author(s) 2015.

Figures

Figure 1

Task paradigm. On Day 1, the Pre-exposure session, participants complete a standard reappraisal task in the behavioral laboratory. On Reappraise trials participants down-regulate the negative emotions elicited by negative images and on Look trials they respond naturally to a matched set of images. This task is completed three times in succession with participants repeatedly Reappraising or Looking at the same images each time. On Day 2, the Active Regulation session, participants complete the reappraisal task in the scanner. On Repeated presentation trials, they once again Reappraise or Look at the images they had Reappraised or Looked at in the Pre-exposure session. On Single presentation trials, they Reappraise or Look at images seen for the first time in the scanning session. On Day 9, the Long-term Re-exposure session, participants passively view all images from the Active Regulation session along with Novel, never before seen, negative images. Inclusion of these images allows determination (see Figure 2) of whether amygdala responses to Repeatedly or Singly reappraised stimuli remain attenuated – as they were during Active Regulation – or whether amygdala responses have returned to their level of response to novel aversive events.

Figure 2

(top row) (A) Conjunction region-of-interest (ROI; shown in green) of right amygdala ROI's showing regulation-related attenuation during Active Regulation (shown in blue; see Table S1) and at Long-term Re-Exposure (shown in yellow; see Table S2). (B) Activity from this overlap right amygdala ROI at Active Regulation (*+ reflects p<0.05, two-tailed). Comparisons marked with *+ are non-independent of the selection criteria for activity during the Active Regulation phase of the study (i.e. Reappraise Negative > Look Negative trials, collapsed across number of presentations) and are shown for illustration of the selection criteria only. ‡ reflects a main effect of number of presentations, p<0.01). (C) Activity from the overlap right amygdala ROI at Long-term Re-exposure (*+ reflects a significant difference from Repeated Reappraise Negative trials, p<0.05, one-tailed), indicating that amygdala attenuation was long-lasting only for repeatedly reappraised images. Comparisons marked with *+ are non-independent of the selection criteria for activity during the Long-term Re-exposure phase of the study (i.e. Repeated Reappraise Negative trials versus all negative image conditions) and are shown for illustration of the selection criteria only. (bottom row) (A) Left vlPFC ROI defined during Active Regulation for the contrast of Reappraise Negative > Look Negative trials (collapsed across number of presentations). (B) Activity from this left vlPFC ROI at Active Regulation. * reflects p<0.05, two-tailed. ‡ reflects a main effect of number of presentations (p<0.01). (C) Activity from this left vlPFC ROI at Long-term Re-exposure is not greater for repeatedly reappraised images, but is instead greater for all repeatedly presented stimuli. This suggests that at Long-term Re-exposure, vlPFC supports retrieval of mnemonic (e.g. semantic) information but does not directly play a role in the lasting attenuation of amygdala responses shown in the row above. ‡ reflects a main effect of number of presentations (p<0.01). All error bars represent ±standard error (SEM).