Emotion Regulation Regions, Part 2
Hitting the studies (semi) systematically
Context
In my last post, I talked about looking for brain regions that are active when people intentionally “regulate emotions”, particularly negative emotions. AKA calming themselves down on purpose.
Here I made a stab at looking through the research literature. This doesn’t include all the relevant studies, but it’s Friday and I’m calling it for this week.
My spreadsheet is here if you want to check it out for yourself.
Methodology
I did a Google Scholar search for “fmri emotion regulation” and went through search results for papers that:
did a whole-brain analysis to generate regions associated with the activity of down-regulating negative emotions (compared to a control activity), and/or
did a whole-brain analysis to correlate brain regions with amygdala activity during down-regulating negative emotions, and/or
did a whole-brain analysis to correlate brain regions with the degree of “success” at emotional regulation
AND
were individual studies not meta-studies or reviews
had findable article text and/or supplementary material containing the relevant tables
I included brain regions (with Brodmann Area if listed) with Z-scores over 4. (If the study’s statistical test wasn’t a Z-score I just listed all of the “significant” regions.)
Then I looked at which regions showed up as “significant” in the most studies.
The reasoning here is that fMRI studies should be expected to report spurious associations, but the overlap between studies may be more likely to be credible.
Results
Regions frequently reported as active during emotional regulation:
Left middle/inferior temporal gyrus (BA21): 13 studies1
Left middle/superior frontal gyrus (BA6): 11 studies
Left inferior frontal gyrus (BA47): 7 studies
Right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA9): 5 studies
Left lingual gyrus (BA19): 5 studies
Regions reported as correlated with reduced amygdala activity during emotional regulation:
Right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: 2 studies
Left medial prefrontal cortex: 2 studies
Left orbitofrontal cortex: 1 study
Left intraparietal sulcus (BA40): 1 study
Left insula (BA13): 1 study
Left inferior frontal gyrus (BA44): 1 study
Right middle frontal gyrus: 1 study
Left inferior parietal lobule: 1 study
Left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: 1 study
Right angular gyrus: 1 study
Precuneus: 1 study
Left posterior superior temporal sulcus: 1 study
Left posterior middle temporal gyrus: 1 study
Left inferior occipital gyrus: 1 study
Regions reported as correlated with success in emotional regulation:
Right ventromedial prefrontal cortex: 2 studies
Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex: 2 studies
Left anterior cingulate (BA10): 1 study
Right anterior cingulate (BA24): 1 study
Right supramarginal gyrus (BA40): 1 study
Right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: 1 study
Left precentral gyrus (BA6): 1 study
Right superior temporal pole (BA9): 1 study
Right inferior temporal gyrus (BA37): 1 study
Right parahippocampal gyrus (BA30): 1 study
Right supramarginal gyrus (BA 48/40): 1 study
Right lingual gyrus (BA37): 1 study
Right angular gyrus (BA7): 1 study
Left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: 1 study
Regions associated with all three:
Right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
What Are These Brain Regions Anyway?
Prefrontal Cortex
Even I knew this one before starting this post. The DLPFC is everyone’s favorite region: right behind your forehead, the part of your brain that doesn’t finish developing till adulthood, the seat of executive function, working memory, decisionmaking about tradeoffs, and self-control.
It would be highly plausible based on context if DLPFC activity played a causal role in consciously downregulating negative emotions (and reducing the amygdala’s reaction to negative-emotion-associated stimuli.)
The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), closer to the midline than the DLPFC, is also widely considered to be important to emotional regulation, in particular “mentalizing” (thinking about mental states, including awareness of one’s own emotional state.)
There’s even a bunch of rTMS evidence that stimulating the prefrontal cortex causes less impulsivity, improved mood and more emotional resilience to criticism, while inhibiting the PFC can cause more reckless or disinhibited behavior and greater hypnotizability.
The prefrontal cortex is probably the first place to look for “will increasing neural activity here do Good Things for emotional regulation?”
Superior Frontal Gyrus
Here’s the frontal lobe. The superior frontal gyrus is near the top of the head; the middle frontal gyrus is a bit off to the side.
It seems to be involved in working memory and similar “higher” cognitive functions. (Could that include emotion regulation? I don’t know, but maybe.)
Inferior Temporal Gyrus
Here’s the temporal lobe, in green. (It’s right under your temples.) The “sulci” are the folds, the “gyri” are the bits that bulge out.
Only primates have temporal lobes! They are used for processing and remembering visual and auditory information, including language.
The inferior temporal gyrus, in particular, is used for visual processing, particularly the “ventral” or “what” stream involved in object recognition.
If the inferior temporal gyrus is particularly active during emotional regulation of responses to images, there’s a good chance that this is an artifact of the fact that they’re images, and it would not be a great candidate region for overall emotional regulation.
Inferior Frontal Gyrus
The inferior frontal gyrus, near the border of the frontal and temporal lobes, is involved in language processing. BA47 in particular is associated with semantics, or comprehending the meanings of words. Damage to BA47 causes language disorder.
Once again, since instructions for the emotion regulation task are always presented verbally, this region’s activity may be an artifact of the experiment and it may not be a good candidate for regional interventions to affect emotional processing.
Lingual Gyrus
The lingual gyrus is way back in the occipital lobe, and is involved in image recognition, particularly letters and words.
Its activity during an emotion regulation task assigned by flashing words on a screen might be an artifact of the experimental design; once again, we might be skeptical that it’s a good candidate region for emotional regulation.
TL;DR: No Surprises Here
It looks like, when people intentionally control their negative emotional responses while they’re in an MRI machine, they’re using their prefrontal cortex.
This is pretty much what you’d expect, but I wanted to check for myself without being primed by reading articles’ editorialized conclusions.
I might mess around with this literature a bit more (including review articles) to see if any other regions seem consistently relevant, but for now the most robust findings seem to be the ones anyone would have have predicted a priori.
BA, or Brodmann Area, is a standard system of mapping brain regions.