Regulating Emotional Responses to Spoken Comments and Visual Images Across the Affective Instability Spectrum: An fMRI Study

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Project Abstract Emotionally distressing, aversive or painful experiences are a part of everyday life experience. Crucial to emotional resilience is the capacity to voluntarily regulate one’s emotional reaction to such experiences. Some people, however, have difficulty modulating their emotional reactions and are subject to sudden, extreme emotional states, especially in response to interpersonal events. This vulnerability, referred to as affective instability (AI), is prototypic of borderline personality disorder (BPD), but is found across a range of psychiatric disorders, and is prevalent, occuring in about 14% of the population. The mechanisms underlying affective instability are not well understood, but there is evidence that adaptive emotion regulation strategies used by healthy individuals are impaired in those with BPD and other disorders characterized by affective instability, and that the brain circuits that typically support these regulation strategies are dysfunctional. This study is designed to determine the extent to which two emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reapprasial and attentional distraction, are dysfunctional across a spectrum of individuals with varying degrees of AI. It will use functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to assess the functioning of underlying brain circuits as these regulation strategies are implemented. In addition to studying AI across a spectrum of disorders, this study will also focus on how spoken emotion is regulated. To date, the strategies of cognitive reappraisal and attentional distraction have been examined as they modulate emotion conveyed via still pictures, but not emotion conveyed by speech directed at the subject, yet the spoken word is one of the most important channels of emotional communication in interpersonal interaction and therefore particularly relevant to AI. The present study will address this knowledge gap. To achieve these aims this project will collect behavioral, physiologic, and functional imagng (fMRI) data as subjects, spanning the full range of AI, employ cognitive reapprasial and attentional distraction to down-regulate their responses to negative emotional cues and cogntive reappraisal to upregulate their responses to positive cues. The same subjects will apply these strategies to emotion presented via both pictures and the spoken word. We will examine activation of brain regions of interest and functionally connected circuits implicated in emotion regulation, as well as skin conductance and pupillary dilation responses, in addition to behavioral responses.