The human brain's ability to regulate emotions is critical for navigating everyday life. As we perceive events unfolding around us, the flexibility to reframe a situation impacts not only how we feel, but also our behavior and decision-making. Some mental health issues are associated with an individual's inability to be flexible, such as when persistent negative thoughts make it hard to perceive a situation differently.
A new Dartmouth-led study is among the first to separate activity relating to emotion generation from emotion regulation in the human brain. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, provide new insights into how emotion regulation works and identify potential targets for clinical applications.
The researchers, led by Ke Bo, used computational methods to examine two independent datasets of fMRI studies. Participants' brain activity was recorded as they viewed negative images and were then asked to recontextualize the stimuli to make them less aversive.
The study reveals that emotion regulation, or "reappraisal," involves particular areas of the anterior prefrontal cortex and other higher-level cortical hierarchies. These regions are involved in other high-level cognitive functions, such as abstract thought and long-term representations of the future. The more people are able to activate these emotion regulation-selective brain regions, the more resilient they are to experiencing something negative without letting it affect them personally.
The researchers also found that the amygdala, known as the threat-related brain region responsible for negative emotion, responds to aversive experiences the same way, whether people are using their thoughts to self-regulate or not. "It's really the cortex that is responsible for generating people's emotional responses, by changing the way we see and attach meaning to events in our environments," says Bo.
Furthermore, the study identified specific neurotransmitter systems, such as those involving cannabinoids, opioids, and serotonin, that overlap with the brain regions involved in emotion regulation. This suggests that the effects of drugs, particularly psychedelics, on mental health disorders may work in part by altering how we think about life events and our ability to self-regulate.