Autobiographical Script-Driven Imagery Has No Detectable Effect on Emotion Regulation in Healthy Individuals

Emotion regulation (ER), the ability to actively modulate one's own emotion reactions, likely depends on the individual's current emotional state. Here, we investigated whether negative emotions induced by an interpersonal autobiographic script affect the neuronal processes underlying ER.

Twenty healthy participants were recruited and underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance of distancing, a specific ER strategy, while viewing emotionally arousing pictures. Participants were instructed to either naturally experience ("permit" condition) or to actively downregulate ("regulate" condition) their emotional responses to the presented stimuli. Before each of the 4 runs in total, a neutral or negative autobiographical audio script was presented. The negative script comprised an emotionally negative event from childhood or adolescence that represented either emotional abuse or emotional neglect. The second event comprised an everyday neutral situation. We aimed at identifying the neural correlates of ER and their modulation by script-driven imagery.

fMRI analyses testing for greater responses in the "regulate" than the "permit" condition replicated previously reported neural correlates of ER in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the right inferior parietal lobule. A significant ER effect was also observed in the left orbitofrontal cortex. In the amygdala, we found greater responses in the "permit" compared to the "regulate" condition. We did not observe a significant modulation of the ER effects in any of these regions by the negative emotional state induced by autobiographical scripts. Bayesian statistics confirmed the absence of such modulations by providing marginal evidence for null effects.

While we replicated previously reported neural correlates of ER, we found no evidence for an effect of mood induction with individualized autobiographical scripts on the neural processes underlying ER in healthy participants.