Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affect

Van Reekum, C. M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1516-1101, Johnstone, T., Urry, H. L., Thurow, M. E., Schaefer, H. S., Alexander, A. L. and Davidson, R. J. (2007) Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affect. NeuroImage, 36 (3). pp. 1041-1055. ISSN 1095-9572 doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.03.052

Abstract/Summary

Recent studies have identified a distributed network of brain regions thought to support cognitive reappraisal processes underlying emotion regulation in response to affective images, including parieto-temporal regions and lateral/medial regions of prefrontal cortex (PFC). A number of these commonly activated regions are also known to underlie visuospatial attention and oculomotor control, which raises the possibility that people use attentional redeployment rather than, or in addition to, reappraisal as a strategy to regulate emotion. We predicted that a significant portion of the observed variance in brain activation during emotion regulation tasks would be associated with differences in how participants visually scan the images while regulating their emotions. We recorded brain activation using fMRI and quantified patterns of gaze fixation while participants increased or decreased their affective response to a set of affective images. fMRI results replicated previous findings on emotion regulation with regulation differences reflected in regions of PFC and the amygdala. In addition, our gaze fixation data revealed that when regulating, individuals changed their gaze patterns relative to a control condition. Furthermore, this variation in gaze fixation accounted for substantial amounts of variance in brain activation. These data point to the importance of controlling for gaze fixation in studies of emotion regulation that use visual stimuli.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/4383
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	No Reading authors. Back catalogue items
Uncontrolled Keywords	ventromedial prefrontal cortex; event-related fmri; unpleasant pictures; posterior cingulate; neural systems; emotional responses; self-regulation; working-memory; visual-search; eye-movements
Publisher	Academic Press Inc Elsevier Science
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