Cognitive neuroscience approach to understanding emotion regulation

闭上眼睛，想象自己站在大峡谷的边缘。想象一下，从悬崖边缘向下看，想象红色的悬崖让位给数百英尺以下的科罗拉多河。对许多人来说，这种心理意象的练习足以产生各种情绪反应，包括主观不适、手心出汗和心跳加速。这个例子代表了人类使用心理意象来调节的能力（即，产生或抑制）情绪。我的研究计划的长期目标是阐明高阶认知过程，如心理意象，如何与情感过程相互作用。 在这个为期5年的探索周期中提出的研究将集中在心理意象和差异恐惧条件反射之间的相互作用。虽然著名的情绪调节理论暗示了心理意象的重要性，但很少有研究调查意象如何与情绪相互作用，以及支撑这种相互作用的认知和神经过程。我提出的探索计划旨在通过追求三个研究主题来弥补这一知识差距。第一个是评估心理意象如何与恐惧条件反射的获得和表达相互作用。第二个是描绘心理意象如何有助于恐惧消退与恐惧重新巩固。第三，确定心理意象如何参与有效的恐惧条件反应的自愿调节。 所提出的方法结合了计算机化的任务，参与者通过心理意象产生或抑制情绪，而我们记录了各种与情绪反应相关的标记。这些包括参与者的主观情绪感受，他们的生理反应，如出汗的手掌，赛车脉搏和负面情绪的面部表情，以及他们的大脑反应，通过功能性磁共振成像测量。在我的研究计划中，本科生和研究生将获得各种技能和知识，包括实验科学，计算和分析技术，如脑成像和机器学习。我的研究项目的成果将提供有关心理意象如何与情感相互作用的新知识，这可能对从第一反应者到与在线和游戏环境相关的技术开发人员等部门产生广泛的影响。

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.