Amygdala–prefrontal coupling underlies individual differences in emotion regulation

“While the amygdala detects the significance of potentially emotion-eliciting situations and generates biobehavioral adjustments associated with that emotion (Phelps and LeDoux, 2005), the PFC provides top-down control, such as inhibiting proponent responses, maintaining affective goals, and recruiting further resource…”

“, 2000), and varies widely across individuals (Gross and John, 2003).”

“Reappraisal involves reinterpreting the meaning of an emotional event; for example, creating an alternative scenario or adopting a different attitude (Gross, 2002; Ochsner et al., 2004).”

“…and ―enhance‖ were used to instruct participants to decrease and increase their negative emotion, respectively, using cognitive reappraisal strategies, and our instruction should not be confused with the ―suppress‖ instruction used by Gross (1998, 2002) which refers to inhibiting expression.”

“Among various forms of regulation, cognitive regulation of emotion using reappraisal as a strategy has received much scientific attention (Ochsner and Gross, 2005).”

“These findings underscore the trait-like quality of individual differences in emotion regulation and suggest that such individual differences may be an important target for understanding normal variation in temperament (Thompson, 1994) and for determining risk for psychopathology (Davidson, 2004; Phillips et al.”

“While the amygdala detects the significance of potentially emotion-eliciting situations and generates biobehavioral adjustments associated with that emotion (Phelps and LeDoux, 2005), the PFC provides top-down control, such as inhibiting proponent responses, maintaining affective goals, and recruiting further resource…”

“…determine the extent to which individual differences in down- regulatory ability predicted amygdala-PFC connectivity, cEMG difference scores of suppress – maintain were regressed voxel-wise on the functional connectivity of the amygdala during suppress versus maintain trials (Friston et al., 1997).”

“, 2006); OFC, through its extensive anatomical connections (Ghashghaei and Barbas, 2002; Ongur and Price, 2000), modulates the amygdala in the reappraisal of contextual value (Dolan, 2007); and lateral and dorsal PFC regions have also been found to influence amygdala function, possibly mediated via the OFC/vmPFC, in r…”

“While previous research has primarily focused on between-subjects findings, our individual differences analyses using cEMG and functional connectivity revealed a new set of large prefrontal clusters that do not overlap with the previously-reported ventromedial/-lateral areas tied to amygdala activation (Johnstone et a…”

“Reappraisal involves reinterpreting the meaning of an emotional event; for example, creating an alternative scenario or adopting a different attitude (Gross, 2002; Ochsner et al., 2004).”

“…amygdala and cEMG activity, and contrasts a more generic circuitry of reappraisal comprising lateral and dorsomedial regions (Kalisch, 2009) with the OFC-like regions usually found in individual difference analyses (Banks et al., 2007; Johnstone et al., 2007; Urry et al., 2006; Wager et al., 2008).”

“…of individual differences in emotion regulation and suggest that such individual differences may be an important target for understanding normal variation in temperament (Thompson, 1994) and for determining risk for psychopathology (Davidson, 2004; Phillips et al., 2008; Taylor and Liberzon, 2007).”

“…shown to exert regulatory influences on the amygdala—pgACC inhibits amygdala activity in the resolution of emotional conflicts (Egner et al., 2008; Etkin et al., 2006); OFC, through its extensive anatomical connections (Ghashghaei and Barbas 2002; Ongur and Price 2000), modulates the amygdala in…”

“Given the imperfect coherence among different emotional systems (Mauss et al., 2005), it is notable that this stability was observed across peripheral and central output systems.”

“…amygdala and cEMG activity, and contrasts a more generic circuitry of reappraisal comprising lateral and dorsomedial regions (Kalisch, 2009) with the OFC-like regions usually found in individual difference analyses (Banks et al., 2007; Johnstone et al., 2007; Urry et al., 2006; Wager et al., 2008).”

“In Session 2, consistent with prior reports (Eippert et al., 2007; Ochsner et al., 2004; Urry et al., 2006; van Reekum et al., 2007), amygdala activationwasmodulated by the regulation instructions (enhance>maintain>suppress;”

“…amygdala and cEMG activity, and contrasts a more generic circuitry of reappraisal comprising lateral and dorsomedial regions (Kalisch, 2009) with the OFC-like regions usually found in individual difference analyses (Banks et al., 2007; Johnstone et al., 2007; Urry et al., 2006; Wager et al., 2008).”

“There are two plausible explanations: First, given prior finding that men show lower cEMG activity to negative pictures as compared to women (Bradley et al., 2001), our male-only sample might have a more limited range to increase cEMG activity above and beyond that already activated in response to…”

“…that emotion (Phelps and LeDoux, 2005), the PFC provides top-down control, such as inhibiting proponent responses, maintaining affective goals, and recruiting further resources (Miller and Cohen, 2001), that steers and potentially modifies activation in subcortical circuitry including the amygdala.”

“…activity in the resolution of emotional conflicts (Egner et al., 2008; Etkin et al., 2006); OFC, through its extensive anatomical connections (Ghashghaei and Barbas 2002; Ongur and Price 2000), modulates the amygdala in the reappraisal of contextual value (Dolan, 2007); and lateral and…”

“Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation 19 In sum, this study complements and extends the extant group-based research by adopting a rigorous individual-differences approach (Braver et al., 2010; Kosslyn et al., 2002) and integrating psychophysiology and neuroimaging (Davidson, 2003).”

“…have previously been shown to exert regulatory influences on the amygdala—pgACC inhibits amygdala activity in the resolution of emotional conflicts (Egner et al., 2008; Etkin et al., 2006); OFC, through its extensive anatomical connections (Ghashghaei and Barbas 2002; Ongur and Price 2000),…”

“In the domain of emotion, however, variation across individuals is the rule rather than the exception (Hamann and Canli, 2004), and such individual differences in the capacity to regulate negative emotion may determine vulnerability and resilience in the face of adversity (Davidson, 2004).”

“3 The terms ―enhance,‖ ―maintain‖ and ―suppress‖ were used based on prior instructions by Jackson et al. (2000).”

“In Session 2, consistent with prior reports (Eippert et al., 2007; Ochsner et al., 2004; Urry et al., 2006; van Reekum et al., 2007), amygdala activationwasmodulated by the regulation instructions (enhance>maintain>suppress;”

“Over the past decade, neuroimaging studies of reappraisal have revealed converging evidence that reappraisal engages sectors of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and subcortical structures such as the amygdala (for a meta-analysis, see Kalisch, 2009).”

“, 2001a), and is increased by direct intracerebral stimulation of the human amygdala (Lanteaume et al., 2007).”

“Single-subject GLM included separate regressors for each regulation condition (negative pictures: enhance, maintain, suppress, and neutral pictures: maintain) to estimate hemodynamic response functions (HRFs; modeled by a set of tent basis functions), six motion estimate covariates (Johnstone et al., 2006), and a seco…”

“In addition, pupil dilation was concurrently measured as an index of cognitive demand to ascertain the paradigm validity (Siegle et al., 2008).”

“It is the basis of cognitive therapy (Frewen et al., 2008), has been found to be more beneficial than suppressing emotions (Ochsner et al.”

“Furthermore, cEMG activity has been shown to be systematically modulated by regulation instructions (Jackson et al., 2000; Lee et al., 2009; Ray et al., 2010), such that cEMG magnitude increases and decreases in accordance with instructions to amplify or attenuate negative emotion, respectively.”

“In sum, this study complements and extends the extant group-based research by adopting a rigorous individual-difference approach (Braver et al., 2010; Kosslyn et al., 2002) and integrating psychophysiology and neuroimaging (Davidson, 2003).”

“…an index of regulatory success (Ochsner et al., 2002; Wager et al., 2008), or used measures reflecting non-specific arousal or effort such as eye-blink startle (Eippert et al., 2007), pupil dilation (Johnstone et al., 2007; Urry et al., 2009), and skin conductance response (Delgado et al., 2008).”

“…et al., 2007; Ochsner et al., 2002; Urry et al., 2006; Wager et al., 2008) and affective disorders (Johnstone et al., 2007; Phillips et al., 2008; Taylor and Liberzon 2007), we specifically interrogated the amygdala-PFC circuit to examine whether amygdala-PFC functional connectivity was…”

“We attempted to control for variance occurring prior to the instruction cue, such as the marked variable time to onset in the amygdala following an emotional stimulus (e.g., Larson et al., 2006), so as to obtain a more accurate estimate of the ―regulation effect‖ which was our main interest.”

“, 2006); OFC, through its extensive anatomical connections (Ghashghaei and Barbas, 2002; Ongur and Price, 2000), modulates the amygdala in the reappraisal of contextual value (Dolan, 2007); and lateral and dorsal PFC regions have also been found to influence amygdala function, possibly mediated via the OFC/vmPFC, in r…”

“In the first session, EMG sensors were placed on the corrugator supercilii muscle (Tassinary et al., 1989), and 6 negative and 4 neutral pictures were presented to familiarize participants with the protocol.”

“In sum, this study complements and extends the extant group-based research by adopting a rigorous individual-difference approach (Braver et al., 2010; Kosslyn et al., 2002) and integrating psychophysiology and neuroimaging (Davidson, 2003).”

“The use of subjective self-report measures of regulatory success can also be problematic because of demand characteristics and other biases such as inaccurate recall that plague the validity of such measures (Davidson, 1992).”

“…5.30 ± 0.93; set 2: valence, 2.98 ± 0.69, arousal, 5.29 ± 0.91) and 42 neutral pictures (set 1: valence, 5.02 ± 0.36, arousal, 2.75 ± 0.57; set 2: valence, 5.04 ± 0.47, arousal, 2.81 ± 0.50) 2 were matched on valence and 1 This finding was assessed with eyeblink startle EMG (Lee et al., 2009).”

“We focused on the amygdala as a downstream target region of regulatory efforts for its activity has consistently been found to covary with regulatory goal (e.g., Eippert et al., 2007; Lapate et al., 2012; Ochsner et al., 2004; Urry et al., 2006; van Reekum et al., 2007).”

“, 2012), and the strength of these functional connections has predicted emotional behaviors of healthy adults (Banks et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2012).”

“, 2006), possibly through functional coupling with the amygdala (Banks et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2012).”

“This pattern is more typical of healthy adults (e.g., Lee et al., 2012), suggesting an acceleration or temporary enhancement of function during development.”