Neural Correlates of Emotional Resilience
do people's brains light up differently when they handle shit well?
What Do Our Brains Do When We Calm Down On Purpose?
I’m in search of an elusive target.
Here’s the elevator pitch:
You know how people get freaked out sometimes and can’t think straight?
They encounter some stimulus that makes them so scared, or mad, or ashamed, that they make bad decisions or lie to themselves or otherwise do something counterproductive?
And you know how sometimes people don’t do that? They stay…sane, or reasonable, or calm, or prudent, or clear-headed, or whatever you want to call it?
How about we make a machine that helps you do less of the dumb-freak-out thing and more of the wise-sane thing?
The “machine to change your brain” part is where I’m going with my series on ultrasound neuromodulation (see posts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).
But I don’t even have a really good definition, let alone a good measurement, of “doing the wise-sane thing instead of the dumb-freakout thing.”
I don’t even have a great pithy phrase for it yet.
I’m pretty sure it’s important, though.
Human ignorance is unavoidable; human stupidity is when we know better in principle but can’t resist doing the dumb thing. Usually this seems to happen when we feel bad.
This is the core of a lot of psychotherapy, self-improvement, or spirituality theories, and it’s almost too obvious to mention when you state it out loud — "negative emotions motivate counterproductive thoughts/behaviors.”
Why does that idiot over there persist in believing something so stupid, or doing something so destructive? He probably feels bad and is reacting to the bad feeling.
What could you do to become 10x more productive or skilled at whatever you’re working on? Often, I bet, it’s not having a bunch of avoidant or aversive reactions that might make you procrastinate on tasks, or hesitate to take chances, or persist on a path despite evidence you should change.1
But anyhow, how do we make a concrete, measurable test of when a person is “being dumb because of bad feels”?
Is there a brain signature of this?
And, conversely, is there a brain signature of successfully resisting or avoiding counterproductive reactions to bad feels?
An Apology: This Literature Is Killing Me
To be perfectly honest, I’m a little out of my depth here; this is going to be more of an interim notes post than a final conclusion.
The problem is that, unlike most of the stuff I read and write about, everybody likes psychology. There are a bajillion studies looking for neural correlates of cognitive/emotional phenomena. Most of those studies, undoubtedly, are Bad. If I could aggregate raw datasets and run my own analyses, I might be able to pull out credible conclusions, but unfortunately sharing data files is not the norm in this field.
fMRI Studies of Emotion Regulation
Emotion Reappraisal
One technique for measuring emotional regulation is to show subjects upsetting photos, and then tell them to “reappraise” them or intentionally reduce their emotional response. For example, people might be instructed to think:
“it’s not real” (e.g. it is just a scene from a movie, they are just pretending)
“things will improve with time”
“things are not as bad as they appear to be” (e.g. the situation looks worse than it is, it could be worse, at least it’s not happening to me)
This, apparently, works: people pretty consistently report weaker negative emotions after they do that mental “reappraisal” procedure.
Is this a good test of emotional resilience? Well, it’s a contrived situation (how upset can you really be from looking at a picture that isn’t super gory or personally relevant?) and you might wonder how it relates to emotional regulation in the real world.
Also, “can you get your negative emotions to diminish on purpose” isn’t all of what we care about — fundamentally we care about avoiding the thing where negative emotions drive people to false beliefs or harmful actions.
But one nice thing about this emotion reappraisal task is that it seems to reliably work as advertised and make sense. People with mood-related mental illnesses are worse at it than healthy people. People undergoing stressful situations (either in real life or in the lab) are also worse at it. Children are worse at it than adults.
As an aside, this phenomenon is super bizarre to me. Are people out there “in the wild” regularly going around calming themselves down by telling themselves that situations are not so bad after all? Does this work for them? Is this one of those Universal Human Experiences That I’m Missing?
The Amygdala And Its Enemies
I have not had time to go through that many fMRI studies, and there are tons of them anyhow, so I don’t have anything resembling a good picture of “which brain regions are ACTUALLY ROBUSTLY more active when people are successfully using reappraisal techniques to calm down after experiencing something that evokes negative emotions?”
One pretty common result, of course, is that the amygdala is activated when people see distressing stimuli, and that often (not always), attempting to "reappraise” the distressing stimuli in a positive light, or other coping mechanisms (mindfulness, distraction, etc), result in reducing amygdala activation. The degree of amygdala activation also often correlates with the degree of self-reported negative emotion, or physiological correlates of emotional upset (cortisol, heart rate, etc).
This all makes sense. The amygdala is active during stress and threat perception. Fear, anger, disgust, lots of negative emotions. People with PTSD and depression have bigger and more active amygdalas. The amygdala is the Angst Nubbin.
I’m inclined to believe this is fairly real. An intervention that helps people manage negative emotions better should be expected to decrease amygdala activation.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a noninvasive technique to directly and specifically inhibit neural activity in the amygdala. (It’s in the middle of the head; rTMS can inhibit bits of cortex but it won’t go that deep.)
Are there other regions of the brain whose activation would inhibit the amygdala? Well, maybe so!
That’s what this fMRI literature might be pointing to (if we could get the signal out of the noise.) You definitely do see increased activation in some brain regions, mostly in the frontal lobes, while people are trying to regulate their emotions. (Studies disagree on which regions though…)
And you sometimes see a correlation between how effectively people use emotional regulation techniques to calm down and how functionally correlated their amygdalas are to these emotion-regulation-related frontal regions. This isn’t saying anything really new. If someone is successfully getting their amygdala to chill out by activating some other region of the brain, then yeah, their amygdala activity will look (anti)correlated with activity in that other region. And if their amygdala never chills out, or if its activity is unpredictable, then there won’t be much correlation.
So if you wanted to go looking for regions of the brain to “activate” to make people better at calming down from states of stress and negative emotion, you probably would want to start by exploring regions that are activated during emotion regulation and seem to cause reduction in amygdala activity.
Regions Active During (Successful) Emotion Regulation
This section summarizes a handful of studies. (There’s a lot more out there and none of them have large sample sizes…take this with a mountain of salt.)
right supramarginal gyrus (BA40) — 3 studies
right anterior cingulate (BA24, BA32) — 2 studies
left orbitofrontal gyrus (BA11) — 2 studies
medial prefrontal cortex (BA10) — 1 study
right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA9) — 1 study
right superior frontal gyrus (BA6) — 1 study
Subjects had higher activation in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex regions while reappraising, as well as some other regions. The regions most strongly associated with greater drops in negative emotion were the right anterior cingulate and supramarginal gyrus.2
When subjects are instructed to “regulate” their negative emotions upon viewing pictures, the orbitofrontal gyrus (BA11) is particularly activated. Also, successfully downregulating negative emotions correlates with reduced amygdala activation.3
In a study of people with social anxiety, participants were asked to write about a humiliating memory and associated negative self beliefs, and to either “react” to reading the writing or mindfully “observe” their experience. All participants decreased their negative emotions when instructed to “observe” vs “react”. Negative emotions for both “observe” and “react” were lower in participants who had completed a mindfulness course or an aerobic exercise program. The right intraparietal sulcus (BA 40) was more active in the “observe” vs “react” conditions, and more so after mindfulness training.4
Subjects asked to watch films, either neutral or disgusting surgical procedures, were able to reduce their subjective negative emotions and their negative facial expressions by using a reappraisal strategy. Reappraisal (vs. just viewing the videos) resulted in increased activation of various frontal brain regions. The more activation of the left orbitofrontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex during reappraisal, the more insula and amygdala activation went down.5
When asked to view images of angry faces and either increase, decrease, or observe their emotional reactions, they felt the most negative emotions in the “increase” condition and the least in the “decrease” condition. Greater success in downregulating negative emotions was correlated with increased activity in the right anterior cingulate (BA 32).6
Subjects asked to reappraise negative images had less amygdala activation than subjects instructed to merely view them; and they had more activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 9), right superior frontal gyrus (BA 6), and left and right inferior parietal cortex (BA 40). The degree of DLPFC activation was correlated with the reduction in amygdala activation.7
Where do we go from here?
Well, what I want to do is a giant meta-analysis of every paper that has ever reported anything about regions activated in emotion regulation.
Whether that is…a thing I will have time to do…remains to be seen.
The other thing I would actually like is a DATASET. An actual functional connectivity dataset with an appreciable sample size, where I can see things that anticorrelate with amygdala activation like…in general.
I do not have one of those either. I don’t know if it exists, but I can keep looking.
La lutte continue!
One time in college my mind was blown by talking through a problem set by a guy who was much “better at physics” than me. It was surprisingly…simple. He wasn’t alluding to any particular concepts or techniques I didn’t know, there were no mysterious leaps of insight, it was just “normal thinking”…but without all the angst, false starts, getting discouraged, etc. that would bog me down. I came away convinced that “normal thinking, but clear-headed and relaxed” just has a huge effect on intellectual performance.
Ochsner, Kevin N., et al. "Rethinking feelings: an FMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion." Journal of cognitive neuroscience 14.8 (2002): 1215-1229.
Mak, Amanda KY, et al. "Neural correlates of regulation of positive and negative emotions: an fMRI study." Neuroscience letters 457.2 (2009): 101-106.
Goldin, Philippe, et al. "MBSR vs aerobic exercise in social anxiety: fMRI of emotion regulation of negative self-beliefs." Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 8.1 (2013): 65-72.
Goldin, Philippe R., et al. "The neural bases of emotion regulation: reappraisal and suppression of negative emotion." Biological psychiatry 63.6 (2008): 577-586.
Morawetz, Carmen, et al. "Intrinsic functional connectivity underlying successful emotion regulation of angry faces." Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 11.12 (2016): 1980-1991.
Walter, Henrik, et al. "The temporal dynamics of voluntary emotion regulation." PLoS one 4.8 (2009): e6726.
My first issue with this sort of thing is in the measurement and philosophy. Like your elevator pitch starts with "You know how people get freaked out sometimes and can’t think straight?". And sure, I sort of know that, though I'm unsure whether it's One Thing. Like first of all, there's a distinction to be made between the interpersonal dynamic (in situation S, upsetting thing T comes up and makes person P unable to think straight), specific relationship to that dynamic (person P has a uniquely strong tendency to be unable to think straight when thing T comes up), the general factor underlying that relationship (person P has a uniquely strong tendency to be unable to think straight when various upsetting things come up), and various specific factors underlying that relationship (person P has a uniquely strong tendency to be unable to think straight when their political outgroup comes up).
It's not even clear to me which of these things you're trying to measure. If we do pick one of them, as you say it's unclear whether the fMRI method measures it well enough. But note that this uncertainty primarily exists because we don't know which thing we're trying to measure, as otherwise one *could* check whether the fMRI method gives similar results to what you'd get in the thing you're looking at.
This is one of the reasons I obsess about measurement so much. Measurement forms the foundation for all the other research that people do, one the one hand it makes it clear why one can just dismiss vast swathes of research out of hand, but on the other hand it also unveils tons of productive research questions. Admittedly those research questions start from a more sociological point of view (what do we mean by resilience and for which purposes do we care about it), but that also yield the benefit of making it easier for people to engage in, as it doesn't require expensive equipment, just some attention to the uses of the research.