Summary with the article: Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies - Buhle (2013)

Which brain regions are involved when we reappraise an emotional stimulus?

Humans are masters in regulation their responses in correspondence to the environment. The generation of emotions starts with the perception of a stimulus within a certain context and attending to each features. After that, the stimulus is being appraised in its emotional significance, leading to affective, behavioural or physiological responses. The stimulus appraisal can be altered, this is also known as cognitive reappraisal. Reappraisal is therefore an import aspect of many forms of psychological therapies. It is thought that the cognitive control processes involved in reappraisal are similar to those used in regulation attention and memory. The amygdala is a key element in the detection, encoding and organization of responses to arousing, goal-relevant stimuli. However, many other brain regions are involved in emotion and there are contrary views on which processes are involved. One view holds that control regions engage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), that in turn modulates the amygdala response. A second view is that control regions modulate semantic representations in the lateral temporal cortex that indirectly influences emotion-related responses in the amygdala. This article provides a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on cognitive reappraisal. The primary focus was to examine reappraisal of emotion versus naturalistic emotional responses.

Three questions

The first question examined was which brain regions are involved in supporting cognitive reappraisal. Studies have found that regions commonly observed in cognitive control tasks are active during cognitive reappraisal. These regions include the posterior dmPFC and bilateral dlPFC, the vlPFC and the posterior parietal cortex. This is in line with psychological models of reappraisal.

The second question consisted of whether implementation of reappraisal involves recruitment of the vmPFC or of the temporal regions that are known to support semantic and perceptual representations. The findings suggest that prefrontal, parietal and temporal regions are consistently recruited by reappraisal, independent on whether the affective response increased or decreased.

The third question was about whether it is the amygdala that modulates reappraisal. Findings revealed bilateral amygdala clusters, with no other clusters observed elsewhere in the brain. This could be explained by the fact that many studies used aversive stimuli, which are known to activate the amygdala stronger than pleasant stimuli. This is because the amygdale is particularly sensitive to detecting threats. Another possibility is that studies commonly used visual stimuli for eliciting emotions. It is known that there is a dense connection between the visual system and the amygdala, which might explain why the cluster was only found in the amygdala.

Concluding, these findings suggest that reappraisal involves the use of cognitive control to modulate semantic representations of an emotional stimulus and that these altered representations cause activity in the amygdala.