Depression and emotion regulation strategy use moderate age-related attentional positivity bias.

Effective emotion regulation is critical for maintaining emotional health in the face of adverse events that accumulate over the lifespan. These abilities are thought to be generally maintained in older adults, accompanied by the emergence of attentional biases to positive information. Such age-related positivity biases, however, are not always reported and may be moderated by individual differences in affective vulnerabilities and competencies, such as those related to dispositional negative affect and emotion regulation styles.

Fear, learning, and the amygdala: a personal reflection in honor of Joseph LeDoux.

In honor of Joseph LeDoux's retirement from an illustrious career in science, I offer a personal reflection on how my graduate training experiences in his lab shaped my subsequent career trajectory and the development of my views on human amygdala function and the scientific enterprise. I discuss the values of openness to scientific exploration and of multi-methodological integration, both of which distinguished his laboratory over the years. I highlight the unique historical context in which the lab's foundational discoveries on the emotional brain occurred and the importance of embracing new technologies to advance an understanding of brain-behavior relationships in affective neuroscience.

Learning emotion regulation: An integrative framework.

Improving emotion regulation abilities, a process that requires learning, can enhance psychological well-being and mental health. Empirical evidence suggests that emotion regulation can be learned-during development and the lifespan, and most explicitly in psychotherapeutic interventions and experimental training paradigms. There is little work however that directly addresses such learning mechanisms.

Reining in regret: emotion regulation modulates regret in decision making.

Whereas the influence of regret on decision making is well-established, it remains unclear whether emotion regulation may modulate both the affective experience of regret and its influence on decisions. To examine this question, participants made decisions about options involving uncertainty using two different, instructed emotion regulation strategies. In one case, they were instructed to treat each choice individually, while in the other they were encouraged to treat a series of decisions as a portfolio.

Counterfactual thinking induces different neural patterns of memory modification in anxious individuals.

Episodic counterfactual thinking (eCFT) is the process of mentally simulating alternate versions of experiences, which confers new phenomenological properties to the original memory and may be a useful therapeutic target for trait anxiety. However, it remains unclear how the neural representations of a memory change during eCFT. We hypothesized that eCFT-induced memory modification is associated with changes to the neural pattern of a memory primarily within the default mode network, moderated by dispositional anxiety levels.

An experimental examination of neurostimulation and cognitive restructuring as potential components for Misophonia interventions.

Misophonia is a disorder of decreased tolerance to certain aversive, repetitive common sounds, or to stimuli associated with these sounds. Two matched groups of adults (29 participants with misophonia and 30 clinical controls with high emotion dysregulation) received inhibitory neurostimulation (1 Hz) over a personalized medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) target functionally connected to the left insula; excitatory neurostimulation (10 Hz) over a personalized dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC) target; and sham stimulation over either target. Stimulations were applied while participants were either listening or cognitively downregulating emotions associated with personalized aversive, misophonic, or neutral sounds.

Retrieval-induced forgetting of emotional memories.

Long-term memory manages its contents to facilitate adaptive behaviour, amplifying representations of information relevant to current goals and expediting forgetting of information that competes with relevant memory traces. Both mnemonic selection and inhibition maintain congruence between the contents of long-term memory and an organism's priorities. However, the capacity of these processes to modulate affective mnemonic representations remains ambiguous.

Neuroimaging of Fear Extinction.

Extinguishing fear and defensive responses to environmental threats when they are no longer warranted is a critical learning ability that can promote healthy self-regulation and, ultimately, reduce susceptibility to or maintenance of affective-, trauma-, stressor-,and anxiety-related disorders. Neuroimaging tools provide an important means to uncover the neural mechanisms of effective extinction learning that, in turn, can abate the return of fear. Here I review the promises and pitfalls of functional neuroimaging as a method to investigate fear extinction circuitry in the healthy human brain.

Self-Relevance Moderates the Relationship between Depressive Symptoms and Corrugator Activity during the Imagination of Personal Episodic Events.

Accumulating evidence suggests depression is associated with blunted reactivity to positive and negative stimuli, known as emotion context insensitivity (ECI). However, ECI is not consistently observed in the literature, suggesting moderators that influence its presence. We propose self-relevance as one such moderator, with ECI most apparent when self-relevance is low.

The representation of emotional experience from imagined scenarios.

One of the key unresolved issues in affective science is understanding how the subjective experience of emotion is structured. Semantic space theory has shed new light on this debate by applying computational methods to high-dimensional data sets containing self-report ratings of emotional responses to visual and auditory stimuli. We extend this approach here to the emotional experience induced by imagined scenarios.

Mood-congruent memory revisited.

Affective experiences are commonly represented by either transient emotional reactions to discrete events or longer term, sustained mood states that are characterized by a more diffuse and global nature. While both have considerable influence in shaping memory, their interaction can produce mood-congruent memory (MCM), a psychological phenomenon where emotional memory is biased toward content affectively congruent with a past or current mood. The study of MCM has direct implications for understanding how memory biases form in daily life, as well as debilitating negative memory schemas that contribute to mood disorders such as depression.

Brain Structure in Acutely Underweight and Partially Weight-Restored Individuals With Anorexia Nervosa: A Coordinated Analysis by the ENIGMA Eating Disorders Working Group.

Background: The pattern of structural brain abnormalities in anorexia nervosa (AN) is still not well understood. While several studies report substantial deficits in gray matter volume and cortical thickness in acutely underweight patients, others find no differences, or even increases in patients compared with healthy control subjects. Recent weight regain before scanning may explain some of this heterogeneity.

Mapping a pathway to improved neuropsychiatric treatments with precision transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation traces the functional and structural connections that modulate amygdala activity, enabling advanced brain stimulation treatments for numerous psychiatric disorders.

Complex functional brain network properties in anorexia nervosa.

Background: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a disorder characterized by an incapacitating fear of weight gain and by a disturbance in the way the body is experienced, facets that motivate dangerous weight loss behaviors. Multimodal neuroimaging studies highlight atypical neural activity in brain networks involved in interoceptive awareness and reward processing.

Methods: The current study used resting-state neuroimaging to model the architecture of large-scale functional brain networks and characterize network properties of individual brain regions to clinical measures.

The Efficacy of Downward Counterfactual Thinking for Regulating Emotional Memories in Anxious Individuals.

Aversive autobiographical memories sometimes prompt maladaptive emotional responses and contribute to affective dysfunction in anxiety and depression. One way to regulate the impact of such memories is to create a downward counterfactual thought-a mental simulation of how the event could have been worse-to put what occurred in a more positive light. Despite its intuitive appeal, counterfactual thinking has not been systematically studied for its regulatory efficacy.

Enhancing cognitive restructuring with concurrent fMRI-guided neurostimulation for emotional dysregulation-A randomized controlled trial.

Background: Transdiagnostic clinical emotional dysregulation is a key component of many mental health disorders and offers an avenue to address multiple disorders with one transdiagnostic treatment. In the current study, we pilot an intervention that combines a one-time teaching and practice of cognitive restructuring (CR) with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), targeted based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Methods: Thirty-seven clinical adults who self-reported high emotional dysregulation were enrolled in this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

The Temporal Dynamics of Spontaneous Emotional Brain States and Their Implications for Mental Health.

Temporal processes play an important role in elaborating and regulating emotional responding during routine mind wandering. However, it is unknown whether the human brain reliably transitions among multiple emotional states at rest and how psychopathology alters these affect dynamics. Here, we combined pattern classification and stochastic process modeling to investigate the chronometry of spontaneous brain activity indicative of six emotions (anger, contentment, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral state.

Enhancing Cognitive Restructuring with Concurrent Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Transdiagnostic Randomized Controlled Trial.

Introduction: Emotional dysregulation constitutes a serious public health problem in need of novel transdiagnostic treatments.

Objective: To this aim, we developed and tested a one-time intervention that integrates behavioral skills training with concurrent repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS).

Methods: Forty-six adults who met criteria for at least one DSM-5 disorder and self-reported low use of cognitive restructuring (CR) were enrolled in a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled trial that used a between-subjects design.

Psychosocial determinants of anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pandemic health threats can cause considerable anxiety, but not all individuals react similarly. To understand the sources of this variability, we applied a theoretical model developed during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 to quantify relationships among intolerance of uncertainty, stress appraisals, and coping style that predict anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. We surveyed 1579 U.

Examining the Role of Lateral Parietal Cortex in Emotional Distancing Using TMS.

We recently proposed a neurocognitive model of distancing-an emotion regulation tactic-with a focus on the lateral parietal cortex. Although this brain area has been implicated in both cognitive control and self-projection processes during distancing, fMRI work suggests that these processes may be dissociable here. This preregistered (NCT03698591) study tested the contribution of left temporoparietal junction (TPJ) to distancing using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Phenomenology of counterfactual thinking is dampened in anxious individuals.

Counterfactual thinking (CFT), or simulating alternative versions of occurred events, is a common psychological strategy people use to process events in their lives. However, CFT is also a core component of ruminative thinking that contributes to psychopathology. Though prior studies have tried to distinguish adaptive from maladaptive CFT, our study provides a novel demonstration that identifies phenomenological differences across CFT in participants with varying levels of trait anxiety.

Extinction learning alters the neural representation of conditioned fear.

Extinction learning is a primary means by which conditioned associations to threats are controlled and is a model system for emotion dysregulation in anxiety disorders. Recent work has called for new approaches to track extinction-related changes in conditioned stimulus (CS) representations. We applied a multivariate analysis to previously -collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data on extinction learning, in which healthy young adult participants (N = 43; 21 males, 22 females) encountered dynamic snake and spider CSs while passively navigating 3D virtual environments.

Proximal threats promote enhanced acquisition and persistence of reactive fear-learning circuits.

Physical proximity to a traumatic event increases the severity of accompanying stress symptoms, an effect that is reminiscent of evolutionarily configured fear responses based on threat imminence. Despite being widely adopted as a model system for stress and anxiety disorders, fear-conditioning research has not yet characterized how threat proximity impacts the mechanisms of fear acquisition and extinction in the human brain. We used three-dimensional (3D) virtual reality technology to manipulate the egocentric distance of conspecific threats while healthy adult participants navigated virtual worlds during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).