Cognition Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Cognition, including details on psychology, neuroscience, memory, brain theory. | ||||||||
|
Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affect.van Reekum CM, Johnstone T, Urry HL, Thurow ME, Schaefer HS, Alexander AL, Davidson RJ Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. cmvanreekum@wisc.edu 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. Published 19 June 2007 in Neuroimage, 36(3): 1041-55.
© 2005-2008 Cognition Research Today. All Rights Reserved. |
| ||||||
