Empirical evidence for a three-level model of emotional contagion, empathy and emotional regulation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustav Nilsonne ◽  
Johanna Schwarz ◽  
Göran Kecklund ◽  
Predrag Petrovic ◽  
Håkan Fischer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Cognitive Reappraisal ◽  
Emotional Contagion ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Emotional Responsiveness ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Empathy For Pain ◽  
Level Model

Background: Emotional contagion, empathy, and emotional regulation are hypothesized to be hierarchically organized functions. Aims: This study aimed to investigate associations between responses in tasks investigating these three functions using both neural representations and ratings. Methods: 86 healthy individuals performed tasks investigating emotional contagion, empathy for pain, and emotional regulation through cognitive reappraisal during functional magnetic resonance imaging.Results: Emotional contagion correlated positively to empathic responding in participants’ ratings. By contrast, rated emotional regulation success correlated negatively to both these measures. Models including brain imaging measures of emotion showed poor fit. Conclusions: Findings are consistent with a hierarchical model of emotional processing in terms of rated emotional contagion and empathy, and suggest that lower emotional regulation capacity is associated with an increased emotional responsiveness at lower (emotional contagion) and higher (empathy) processing levels.

scholarly journals Sleep restriction caused impaired emotional regulation without detectable brain activation changes—a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 181704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Tamm ◽  
Gustav Nilsonne ◽  
Johanna Schwarz ◽  
Armita Golkar ◽  
Göran Kecklund ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Cognitive Reappraisal ◽  
Imaging Study ◽  
Sleep Restriction ◽  
Dorsolateral Prefrontal ◽  
Normal Sleep ◽  
Increased Activity

Sleep restriction has been proposed to cause impaired emotional processing and emotional regulation by inhibiting top-down control from prefrontal cortex to amygdala. Intentional emotional regulation after sleep restriction has, however, never been studied using brain imaging. We aimed here to investigate the effect of partial sleep restriction on emotional regulation through cognitive reappraisal. Forty-seven young (age 20–30) and 33 older (age 65–75) participants (38/23 with complete data and successful sleep intervention) performed a cognitive reappraisal task during fMRI after a night of normal sleep and after restricted sleep (3 h). Emotional downregulation was associated with significantly increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex ( p FWE < 0.05) and lateral orbital cortex ( p FWE < 0.05) in young, but not in older subjects. Sleep restriction was associated with a decrease in self-reported regulation success to negative stimuli ( p < 0.01) and a trend towards perceiving all stimuli as less negative ( p = 0.07) in young participants. No effects of sleep restriction on brain activity nor connectivity were found in either age group. In conclusion, our data do not support the idea of a prefrontal-amygdala disconnect after sleep restriction, and neural mechanisms underlying behavioural effects on emotional regulation after insufficient sleep require further investigation.

scholarly journals Sleep restriction caused impaired emotional regulation without detectable brain activation changes – a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Tamm ◽  
Gustav Nilsonne ◽  
Johanna Schwarz ◽  
Armita Golkar ◽  
Göran Kecklund ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Cognitive Reappraisal ◽  
Imaging Study ◽  
Sleep Restriction ◽  
Dorsolateral Prefrontal ◽  
Normal Sleep ◽  
Increased Activity

SummarySleep restriction has been proposed to cause impaired emotional processing and emotional regulation by inhibiting top-down control from prefrontal cortex to amygdala. Intentional emotional regulation after sleep restriction has however never been studied using brain imaging. We here aimed to investigate the effect of sleep restriction on emotional regulation through cognitive reappraisal. Forty-seven young (age 20-30) and 33 older (age 65-75) participants (38/23 with complete data and successful sleep intervention) performed a cognitive reappraisal task during fMRI after a night of normal sleep and after restricted sleep (3h). Emotional downregulation was associated with significantly increased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (pFWE < 0.05) and lateral orbital cortex (pFWE < 0.05) in young, but not in older subjects. Sleep restriction was associated with a decrease in self-reported regulation success to negative stimuli (p < 0.01) and a trend towards perceiving all stimuli as less negative (p = 0.07), in young participants. No effects of sleep restriction on brain activity nor connectivity were found in either age group. In conclusion, our data do not support the idea of a prefrontal-amygdala disconnect after sleep restriction, and neural mechanisms underlying behavioural effects on emotional regulation after insufficient sleep require further investigation.

Evidence of diagnostic specificity in the neural correlates of facial affect processing in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia: a meta-analysis of functional imaging studies

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-569 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Delvecchio ◽  
G. Sugranyes ◽  
S. Frangou
Keyword(s):  
Bipolar Disorder ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Emotional Regulation ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Likelihood Estimation ◽  
Facial Affect ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
Processing Network ◽  
Affect Processing

BackgroundSchizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) may overlap in etiology and phenomenology but differ with regard to emotional processing. We used facial affect as a probe for emotional processing to determine whether there are diagnosis-related differences between SZ and BD in the function of the underlying neural circuitry.MethodFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies published up to 30 April 2012 investigating facial affect processing in patients with SZ or BD were identified through computerized and manual literature searches. Activation foci from 29 studies encompassing 483 healthy individuals, 268 patients with SZ and 267 patients with BD were subjected to voxel-based quantitative meta-analysis using activation likelihood estimation (ALE).ResultsCompared to healthy individuals, when emotional facial stimuli were contrasted to neutral stimuli, patients with BD showed overactivation within the parahippocampus/amygdala and thalamus and reduced engagement within the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) whereas patients with SZ showed underactivation throughout the entire facial affect processing network and increased activation in visual processing regions within the cuneus. Patients with BD showed greater thalamic engagement compared to patients with SZ; in the reverse comparison, patients with SZ showed greater engagement in posterior associative visual cortices.ConclusionsDuring facial affect processing, patients with BD show overactivation in subcortical regions and underactivation in prefrontal regions of the facial affect processing network, consistent with the notion of reduced emotional regulation. By contrast, overactivation within visual processing regions coupled with reduced engagement of facial affect processing regions points to abnormal visual integration as the core underlying deficit in SZ.

Trait Worry and Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation

2017 ◽  
Vol 225 (3) ◽  
pp. 214-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Kristin Neudert ◽  
Rudolf Stark ◽  
Laura Kress ◽  
Andrea Hermann
Keyword(s):  
Emotion Regulation ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Cognitive Reappraisal ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Negative Feelings ◽  
Healthy Females

Abstract. Pathological worrying is of high transdiagnostic relevance and is related to maladaptive emotion regulation processes. Dysfunctional emotion regulation and its underlying neural mechanisms might contribute to the maintenance of fear over time. Therefore, this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aims at investigating the association of trait worry with neural correlates of emotion regulation. Twenty-six healthy females were instructed to passively look at aversive pictures, to distract themselves with a neutral thought, or to down- and up-regulate negative feelings via cognitive reappraisal in response to repeatedly presented aversive pictures. Trait worry was not related to cognitive reappraisal but to distraction, which leads to a greater reduction of self-reported negative feelings and insula activation in individuals with higher trait worry. The current study indicates that the neural mechanisms underlying distraction seem to be altered in pathological worrying and may prevent adaptive emotional processing of aversive stimuli leading to the maintenance of fear.

scholarly journals Emotional contagion of pain across different social cues shares common and process-specific neural representations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Zhou ◽  
Jialin Li ◽  
Weihua Zhao ◽  
Lei Xu ◽  
Xiaoxiao Zheng ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Anterior Cingulate Cortex ◽  
Emotional Contagion ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Thermal Stimulation ◽  
Anterior Cingulate ◽  
Fmri Data ◽  
Whole Brain ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Experienced Pain ◽  
Multivariate Pattern

AbstractInsular and anterior cingulate cortex activation across vicarious pain induction procedures suggests that they are core pain empathy nodes. However, pain empathic responses encompass emotional contagion as well as unspecific arousal and overlapping functional activations are not sufficient to determine shared and process-specific neural representations. We employed multivariate pattern analyses to fMRI data acquired during physical and affective vicarious pain induction and found spatially and functionally similar cross-modality (physical versus affective) whole-brain vicarious pain-predictive patterns. Further analyses consistently identified shared neural representations in the bilateral mid-insula. Mid-insula vicarious pain patterns were not sensitive to capture non-painful arousing negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced pain during thermal stimulation, suggesting process-specific representation of emotional contagion for pain. Finally, a domain-general vicarious pain pattern which predicted vicarious as well as self-experienced pain was developed. Our findings demonstrate a generalizable neural expression of vicarious pain and suggest that the mid-insula encodes emotional contagion for pain.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document