Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation in Multiple Sclerosis
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Date
2019-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Cognitive reappraisal is considered an adaptive emotion regulation strategy, involving the reinterpretation of negatively valenced stimuli. This process of reappraisal is thought to be cognitively demanding and is accompanied by increased recruitment of executive control regions and reduced activation in emotion-generating regions of the brain. However, there are few studies examining the neural correlates of reappraisal in populations with chronic medical illnesses, such as individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), who experience greater emotion dysregulation and higher rates of cognitive impairment than the general population. This study investigated the associations between cognitive capacity, measured using the WAIS-IV Working Memory Index, and neural and behavioral correlates of reappraisal in 38 participants (ages 30-59) diagnosed with relapsing-remitting MS. Participants completed an emotion regulation task in the MRI, where they were asked to use reappraisal or simply observe negative or neutral health-related images. When viewing negative compared to neutral images, participants reported higher negativity ratings and were less successful at suppressing regions of the default-mode network, likely representing internal mentation in response to the images. Implementation of reappraisal resulted in significant downregulation of negative emotions and activation of regions frequently observed in previous studies of healthy adults, including inferior and superior frontal gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Interestingly, during reappraisal, those with greater cognitive capacity exhibited more recruitment of the dlPFC, which in turn was associated with reappraisal success. These results suggest that better cognitive functioning in individuals with MS is linked to more successful implementation of cognitive reappraisal.
Description
Honorable Mention at OSU's Spring Undergraduate Research Festival 2019
Keywords
emotion regulation, cognitive capacity, multiple sclerosis, cognitive reappraisal