Dataset Information

Emotion Regulation and Excess Weight: Impaired Affective Processing Characterized by Dysfunctional Insula Activation and Connectivity.

ABSTRACT: Emotion-regulation strategies are understood to influence food intake. This study examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of negative emotion processing and emotion regulation in individuals with excess weight compared to normal-weight controls. Fifteen participants with excess-weight (body mass index >25) and sixteen normal-weight controls (body mass index 18-25) performed an emotion-regulation task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were exposed to 24 negative affective or neutral pictures that they were instructed to Observe (neutral pictures), Maintain (sustain the emotion elicited by negative pictures) or Regulate (down-regulate the emotion provoked by negative pictures through previously trained reappraisal techniques). When instructed to regulate negative emotions by means of cognitive reappraisal, participants with excess weight displayed persistently heightened activation in the right anterior insula. Decreased responsivity was also found in right anterior insula, the orbitofrontal cortex and cerebellum during negative emotion experience in participants with excess weight. Psycho-physiological interaction analyses showed that excess-weight participants had decreased negative functional coupling between the right anterior insula and the right dlPFC, and the bilateral dmPFC during cognitive reappraisal. Our findings support contentions that excess weight is linked to an abnormal pattern of neural activation and connectivity during the experience and regulation of negative emotions, with the insula playing a key role in these alterations. We posit that ineffective regulation of emotional states contributes to the acquisition and preservation of excess weight.

SUBMITTER: Steward T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4803189 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Emotion Regulation and Excess Weight: Impaired Affective Processing Characterized by Dysfunctional Insula Activation and Connectivity.

Steward Trevor T Picó-Pérez Maria M Mata Fernanda F Martínez-Zalacaín Ignacio I Cano Marta M Contreras-Rodríguez Oren O Fernández-Aranda Fernando F Yucel Murat M Soriano-Mas Carles C Verdejo-García Antonio A

PloS one 20160322 3

Emotion-regulation strategies are understood to influence food intake. This study examined the neurophysiological underpinnings of negative emotion processing and emotion regulation in individuals with excess weight compared to normal-weight controls. Fifteen participants with excess-weight (body mass index >25) and sixteen normal-weight controls (body mass index 18-25) performed an emotion-regulation task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were exposed to 24 negative aff ...[more]

PMID: 27003840

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Project description:While naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, better represent the complexity of the real world and are perhaps crucial to understanding the dynamics of emotion processing, there is limited research on emotions with naturalistic stimuli. There is a need to understand the temporal dynamics of emotion processing and their relationship to different dimensions of emotion experience. In addition, there is a need to understand the dynamics of functional connectivity underlying different emotional experiences that occur during or prior to such experiences. To address these questions, we recorded the EEG of participants and asked them to mark the temporal location of their emotional experience as they watched a video. We also obtained self-assessment ratings for emotional multimedia stimuli. We calculated dynamic functional the connectivity (DFC) patterns in all the frequency bands, including information about hubs in the network. The change in functional networks was quantified in terms of temporal variability, which was then used in regression analysis to evaluate whether temporal variability in DFC (tvDFC) could predict different dimensions of emotional experience. We observed that the connectivity patterns in the upper beta band could differentiate emotion categories better during or prior to the reported emotional experience. The temporal variability in functional connectivity dynamics is primarily related to emotional arousal followed by dominance. The hubs in the functional networks were found across the right frontal and bilateral parietal lobes, which have been reported to facilitate affect, interoception, action, and memory-related processing. Since our study was performed with naturalistic real-life resembling emotional videos, the study contributes significantly to understanding the dynamics of emotion processing. The results support constructivist theories of emotional experience and show that changes in dynamic functional connectivity can predict aspects of our emotional experience.

Project description:IntroductionEmotion processing deficits often occur in patients with schizophrenia. We investigate whether patients and controls differ in the association between facial emotion recognition and experience of affective empathy and whether performance on these emotion processing domains differently relates to white matter connectivity.Materials and methodsForty-seven patients with schizophrenia and 47 controls performed an emotion recognition and affective empathy task. T1-weighted and diffusion-tensor images (DTI) of the brain were acquired. Using Tracula 5.3, ten fibers were reconstructed and fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), axial diffusivity (AD), and radial diffusivity (RD) were extracted. Groups were compared on task performance, white matter measures and their interactions using ANCOVAs. Correction for multiple comparisons was applied.ResultsPatients scored lower on emotion recognition (p = 0.037) and reported higher levels of affective empathy (p < 0.001) than controls. Patients with poor emotion recognition (PT-low) experienced stronger affective empathy than patients with similar emotion recognition performance as controls (PT-normal; p = 0.011), who in turn reported stronger affective empathy than controls (p = 0.043). We found a significant interaction between emotion recognition, affective empathy and anterior thalamic radiation AD (p = 0.017, d = 0.43). Post hoc analyses revealed that the correlation between AD and empathy differed significantly between all groups (empathy/AD in PT-low < empathy/AD in PT-normal < empathy/AD in controls).DiscussionIn patients with poor emotion recognition, the negative association between anterior thalamic radiation AD and affective empathy was stronger than in patients with normal emotion recognition capacity. Possibly, axonal damage in fronto-thalamic structural connections, as part of a larger frontotemporal network, underlies the association between poor emotion recognition and higher levels of affective empathy in schizophrenia patients.

Dataset Information

Emotion Regulation and Excess Weight: Impaired Affective Processing Characterized by Dysfunctional Insula Activation and Connectivity.

Publications

Emotion Regulation and Excess Weight: Impaired Affective Processing Characterized by Dysfunctional Insula Activation and Connectivity.

Similar Datasets

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