Positive and detached reappraisal in older adulthood: A temporal examination of gaze patterns

Neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal of positive and negative affect in older adults

OBJECTIVES

Compromised regulation of negative and positive emotions is a common feature of psychopathology. Healthy aging relates to changes in affective processing, but older adults' regulation of positive affect is less well understood than regulation of negative affect. We examined the cognitive reappraisal of positive and negative affect in healthy younger and older adults, and the neural correlates of reappraisal among older adults.

METHOD

Participants viewed negative, positive, and neutral IAPS images and were instructed to attend or reappraise their affective response. Younger and older adults (N = 31) in the behavioral pilot were asked to report on their affect after each image. Another group of older adults (N = 19) completed the same task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging.

RESULTS

Behaviorally, older adults were less effective than young adults at downregulating negative and positive affect. Older adults showed engagement of cognitive control regions when regulating negative affect, but not positive affect. Older adults showed increased, rather than decreased, activation in emotion appraisal regions when reappraising negative affect.

DISCUSSION

These results may suggest that older adults are less engaged with negative stimuli ; however, future work is needed to address several limitations such as a limited sample size. In addition, we recommend future researchers expand on this work examining regulation of both positive and negative affect among older adults.

Functional connectivity predicts the dispositional use of expressive suppression but not cognitive reappraisal

INTRODUCTION

Previous research has identified specific brain regions associated with regulating emotion using common strategies such as expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal. However, most research focuses on a priori regions and directs participants how to regulate, which may not reflect how people naturally regulate outside the laboratory.

METHOD

Here, we used a data-driven approach to investigate how individual differences in distributed intrinsic functional brain connectivity predict emotion regulation tendency outside the laboratory. Specifically, we used connectome-based predictive modeling to extract functional connections in the brain significantly related to the dispositional use of suppression and reappraisal. These edges were then used in a predictive model and cross-validated in novel participants to identify a neural signature that reflects individual differences in the tendency to suppress and reappraise emotion.

RESULTS

We found a significant neural signature for the dispositional use of suppression, but not reappraisal. Within this whole-brain signature, the intrinsic connectivity of the default mode network was most informative of suppression tendency. In addition, the predictive performance of this model was significant in males, but not females.

CONCLUSION

These findings help inform how whole-brain networks of functional connectivity characterize how people tend to regulate emotion outside the laboratory.