Cognitive neuroscience approach to understanding emotion regulation

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Close your eyes and imagine standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Imagine looking down over the edge, visualize the red cliffs as they give way to the Colorado River hundreds of feet below. For many, this exercise in mental imagery is sufficient to produce various markers of emotional reactivity, including subjective discomfort, sweaty palms, and a racing heart. This example typifies the human capacity for using mental imagery to regulate (i.e., generate or suppress) emotions. The long-term goal of my research program is to elucidate how higher-order cognitive processes, such as mental imagery, interact with emotional processes. The research proposed over this 5-year Discovery cycle will focus on the interaction between mental imagery and differential fear conditioning. While prominent theories of emotion regulation insinuate the importance of mental imagery, very little research has been done to investigate both how imagery interacts with emotion, and the cognitive and neural process underpinning this interaction. My proposed Discovery program aims to remedy this gap in knowledge by pursuing three research themes. The first is to evaluate how mental imagery interacts with the acquisition and expression of fear conditioning. The second is to delineate how mental imagery contributes to fear extinction versus fear reconsolidation. The third is to determine how mental imagery participates in the voluntary modulation of a valid fear conditioned reaction. The proposed approach combines computerized tasks that have participants either generate or suppress emotions via mental imagery while we record a variety of markers associated with emotional reactivity. These include participants' subjective emotional feelings, their physiological responses such as sweaty palms, racing pulse and facial expressions of negative emotion, and their brain response as measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Within my research program undergraduate and graduate student will receive a diverse set of skills and knowledge, including experimental science, and computational and analytic techniques such as brain imaging and machine learning. The output of my research program will provide new knowledge regarding how mental imagery interacts with emotion, which can have broad implications for sectors ranging from first responders to technology developers associate with online and gaming environments.