Neural correlates of implicit emotion processing and regulation in the SEAT paradigm: A meta-analysis of fMRI studies

Implicit emotion regulation has attracted increasing attention in cognitive neuroscience, and the Shifted-Attention Emotion Appraisal Task (SEAT) provides a well-established paradigm to probe emotion processing and incidental regulation without requiring explicit down-regulation instructions. However, the reproducible neural correlates of distinct SEAT components remain unclear across fMRI studies. We therefore conducted a voxel-wise coordinate-based meta-analysis using Seed-based d Mapping with Permutation of Subject Images (SDM-Psi v6.21) on 10 studies (N = 489), comprising 24 eligible experiments and 152 reported peak coordinates. A random-effects mean analysis was performed, using a commonly applied SDM threshold (voxel-wise p < 0.005, cluster extent ≥ 10 voxels). Across studies, Implicit Emotional Processing in SEAT consistently engaged the medial superior frontal gyrus and the putamen/striatum. Emotion Modulation by Attention Shifting showed convergent activations in the middle frontal gyrus and dorsolateral superior frontal regions. Emotion Modulation by Appraisal reliably recruited dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the triangular inferior frontal gyrus, and the insula, alongside additional lateral prefrontal clusters. Together, these findings indicate that SEAT elicits reproducible activation patterns involving medial and lateral prefrontal regions as well as subcortical and salience-related structures, supporting its utility for studying implicit emotion processing and regulation.