Benefits of Implicit Regulation of Instructed Fear: Evidence From Neuroimaging and Functional Connectivity.

Instructed fear, which denotes fearful emotions learned from others' verbal instructions, is an important form of fear acquisition in humans. Maladaptive instructed fear produces detrimental effects on health, but little is known about performing an efficient regulation of instructed fear and its underlying neural substrates. To address this question, 26 subjects performed an instructed fear task where emotional experiences and functional neuroimages were recorded during watching, explicit regulation (calmness imagination), and implicit regulation (calmness priming) conditions. Results indicated that implicit regulation decreased activity in the left amygdala and left insula for instructed fear; however, these effects were absent in explicit regulation. The implementation of implicit regulation did not increase activity in the frontoparietal control regions, while explicit regulation increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity. Furthermore, implicit regulation increased functional connectivity between the right amygdala and right fusiform gyrus, and decreased functional connectivity between the right medial temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, which are key nodes of memory retrieval and cognitive control networks, respectively. These findings suggest a favourable effect of implicit regulation on instructed fear, which is subserved by less involvement of control-related brain mechanisms.

Regulatory effect of implicit acceptance during outcome evaluation: The temporal dynamics in an event-related potential study.

The acceptance of emotion is important for humans' wellbeing and social functioning. Despite its regulatory advantages, the temporal dynamics of acceptance for regulating decision-related emotion remains unclear. For this purpose, Event-related potentials were recorded for outcome presentation, when participants either in explicit or implicit acceptance condition performed a Gambling Task. Results showed that acceptance effectively regulated emotional experiences, irrespective of how it was realized (explicit/implicit). Compared to viewing condition, explicit acceptance increased overall amplitudes of feedback-related negativity (FRN,180-240 ms) at the early stage and reduced P3 amplitude (240-440 ms) in general at the late stage, regardless of feedback valence or magnitude. By contrast, implicit acceptance did not influence the FRN amplitudes but increased the P3 amplitudes globally, an effect unaffected by feedback valence and magnitude. In addition, the P3 amplitude for explicit acceptance was negatively correlated with the ratio of risky choices, regardless of outcome valence. These results suggest that explicit acceptance is associated with cognitive conflict and resource depletion, while these adverse effects are not engendered during implicit acceptance. These regulatory effects are independent of specific feedback valence and magnitude. These findings highlight the role of implicit acceptance in cognitive demanding context, such as decision-making.

Individual Differences in Spontaneous Expressive Suppression Predict Amygdala Responses to Fearful Stimuli: The Role of Suppression Priming.

Though the spontaneous emotion regulation has received long discussions, few studies have explored the regulatory effects of spontaneous expressive suppression in neural activations, especially in collectivistic cultural context. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed to examine whether individual differences in the tendency to use suppression are correlated with amygdala responses to negative situations when individuals are unconsciously primed with expressive suppression. Twenty-three healthy Chinese undergraduates completed an fMRI paradigm involving fear processing, and a synonym matching task was added to prime participants with the unconscious (automatic) expressive suppression goal. Participants completed measures of typical emotion regulation use (reappraisal and suppression), trait anxiety, and neuroticism. Results indicated that only in emotion suppression prime condition, greater use of suppression in everyday life was related to decreased amygdala activity. These associations were not attributable to variation in trait anxiety, neuroticism, or the habitual use of reappraisal. These findings suggest that in collectivistic cultural settings, individual differences in expressive suppression do not alter fear-related neural activation during suppression-irrelevant context. However, unconscious suppression priming facilitates the manifestation of individual differences in the neural consequence of expressive suppression, as reflected by the priming-specific decrease of emotional subcortical activations with more use of expressive suppression.