Study challenges assumed brain basis of emotion regulation

An international study involving the University of Innsbruck has challenged the idea that emotion regulation can be measured by activity in a single brain region, ORF reported. Researchers found that activity in the prefrontal cortex did not predict how successfully people regulated their feelings.

The team analysed functional MRI data from 2,175 people across 40 studies. It focused on cognitive reappraisal, the practice of changing how a situation is interpreted. For example, someone criticised by a supervisor might view the criticism as a sign that their work is being taken seriously and that the project’s success matters.

The study was designed by Maurizio Sicorello of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, alongside Carmen Morawetz of the University of Innsbruck and Jenny Zähringer of the institute. Sicorello said changing feelings by reconsidering a situation is more complex than exercising a mental muscle.

Morawetz, a professor of affective neuroscience at the University of Innsbruck and the study’s senior author, said the findings do not mean the prefrontal cortex is unimportant. But people may reach the same emotional outcome through different neural pathways, making it too simplistic to use activity in one brain region as a measure of an individual’s ability to regulate emotions. This may also have implications for clinical research, where lower prefrontal activity is often treated as a sign of impaired emotion regulation.