Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 65, Issue 5, 1 March 2009, Pages 361-366
Biological Psychiatry

Priority Communication
Coping with Emotions Past: The Neural Bases of Regulating Affect Associated with Negative Autobiographical Memories

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.10.019Get rights and content

Background

Although the ability to adaptively reflect on negative autobiographical experiences without ruminating is critical to mental health, to our knowledge no research has directly examined the neural systems underlying this process.

Methods

Sixteen participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they focused on negative autobiographical memories using cognitive strategies designed to facilitate (feel strategy) versus undermine (analyze and accept strategies) rumination.

Results

Two key findings were obtained. First, consistent with prior emotion regulation research using image-based stimuli, left prefrontal activity was observed during the implementation of all three strategies. Second, activity in a network of regions involved in self-referential processing and emotion, including subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex, was highest in response to the feel strategy and lowest for the accept strategy. This pattern of activation mirrored participants' self-reports of negative affect when engaging in each strategy.

Conclusions

These findings shed light on the brain regions that distinguish adaptive versus maladaptive forms of reflecting on negative autobiographical memories and offer a novel, ecologically valid route to exploring the neural bases of emotion regulation using fMRI.

Section snippets

Methods and Materials

Twenty-four Columbia University affiliates (15 female subjects; M age = 20.83, SD = 3.27) provided informed consent. Prospective participants were screened to ensure they were not currently undergoing treatment from a mental health professional, taking mental health-related medication (e.g., Prozac), were claustrophobic, or had metal in their bodies. The sample consisted of 60% European Americans, 24% Asians, 4% African Americans, and 12% other.

Results

We first examined regions commonly active across all three strategies by performing a conjunction analysis on regions active for each strategy versus the baseline task. This analysis revealed increased activity in occipital regions implicated in visualizing recollected events as well as left lateral prefrontal regions previously implicated in studies of cognitive reappraisal using visual stimuli (Table 1; Figure 1).

Next, we used an analysis of variance (ANOVA) with strategy as the

Discussion

To our knowledge, this study is the first to directly examine the neural systems underlying the ability to regulate emotion by adaptively reflecting on negative autobiographical experiences without ruminating. Two key findings were obtained.

First, consistent with prior research using image-based stimuli (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 41), left PFC was observed during the implementation of all three strategies. In the context of prior work, this suggests that

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