Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Are Inversely Coupled during Regulation of Negative Affect and Predict the Diurnal Pattern of Cortisol Secretion among Older Adults

By Heather L. Urry, C. V. van Reekum, Tom Johnstone, Ned H. Kalin, Marchell E. Thurow, Hillary S. Schaefer, C. Jackson, C. Frye, L. Greischar, Andrew L. Alexander and 1 more. Journal of Neuroscience, 2006

1,063 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Among younger adults, the ability to willfully regulate negative affect, enabling effective responses to stressful experiences, engages regions of prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala. Because regions of PFC and the amygdala are known to influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, here we test whether PFC and amygdala responses during emotion regulation predict the diurnal pattern of salivary cortisol secretion. We also test whether PFC and amygdala regions are engaged during emotion regulation in older (62- to 64-year-old) rather than younger individuals. We measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging as participants regulated (increased or decreased) their affective responses or attended to negative picture stimuli. We also collected saliva samples for 1 week at home for cortisol assay. Consistent with previous work in younger samples, increasing negative affect resulted in ventral lateral, dorsolateral, and dorsomedial regions of PFC and amygdala activation. In contrast to previous work, decreasing negative affect did not produce the predicted robust pattern of higher PFC and lower amygdala activation. Individuals demonstrating the predicted effect (decrease < attend in the amygdala), however, exhibited higher signal in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) for the same contrast. Furthermore, participants displaying higher VMPFC and lower amygdala signal when decreasing compared with the attention control condition evidenced steeper, more normative declines in cortisol over the course of the day. Individual differences yielded the predicted link between brain function while reducing negative affect in the laboratory and diurnal regulation of endocrine activity in the home environment.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e0e757f71e3cb13722bf77231178a05229ee000

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Citations in the corpus

The psychology of emotion regulation: An integrative review (2009, background): “During reappraisal, emotional regions of the brain may become inversely coupled to the activation of specific regions in the prefrontal cortex (Urry et al., 2006).”
Temperament theory and the study of cognition-emotion interactions across development (2007, background): “Specifically, Davidson and others have identified two circuits of inter-related brain regions that function to support emotion, affective style, and emotion regulation (Heller, Koven, & Miller, 2003; Jackson et al., 2003; Urry et al., 2006).”
The development of emotion regulation: an fMRI study of cognitive reappraisal in children, adolescents and young adults. (2012, background): “, 2002) and has been previously implicated in successfully transformed affect due to reappraisal in older adults (Urry et al., 2006).”
The Neurocircuitry of Fear, Stress, and Anxiety Disorders (2011, background): “Reappraisal of emotionally negative photographs is associated with reduced amygdala activation (Ochsner et al, 2002) and increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation (Urry et al, 2006).”
The neural bases of emotion regulation: reappraisal and suppression of negative emotion. (2008, neutral): “Suppression produced significant responses only during the late period in PFC regions (ventromedial, ventrolateral, dorsolateral, rostral and dorsal ACC), left fusiform gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, middle and superior occipital gyrus, and thalamus (Table 3).”
A time of change: behavioral and neural correlates of adolescent sensitivity to appetitive and aversive environmental cues. (2010, background): “When healthy adult participants are asked to consciously suppress their affective responses to salient environmental cues, enhanced activity is often observed in ventrolateral and medial prefrontal cortices (Ochsner & Gross, 2005; Urry et al., 2006).”
Prefrontal-subcortical pathways mediating successful emotion regulation. (2008, neutral): “…in other reappraisal studies that use the amygdala as an outcome variable – but did not measure emotional experience (or any other behavioral index of emotional response) (Johnstone et al., 2007; Urry et al., 2006; van Reekum et al., 2007) – may in fact be relevant to shaping emotional experience.”
Whole Brain Resting-State Analysis Reveals Decreased Functional Connectivity in Major Depression (2010, neutral): “Depicted in red are the controls, in black the MDD group, both sorted from smallest to highest z-value. negative affect in healthy controls (Urry et al., 2006), as was reflected by decreasing amygdala activation with increasing vmPFC activation.”
Neural network of cognitive emotion regulation — An ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis (2013, background): “In the past decade, an increasing number of neuroimaging studies have focused on neural correlates of emotion regulation (Beauregard et al., 2001; Domes et al., 2010; Ochsner et al., 2002, 2004; Schulze et al., 2011; Urry et al., 2006; van Reekum et al., 2007; Wager et al., 2008).”
Neural Circuitry Underlying the Regulation of Conditioned Fear and Its Relation to Extinction (2008, neutral): “…or immediately adjacent vmPFC region) similar to that observed in the present study (e.g., Harenski and Hamann, 2006; Kalisch et al., 2005b; Kim and Hamann, 2007; Ochsner et al., 2004a; Urry et al., 2006), supporting a general role for this region in mediating inhibition of the amygdala response.”
Emotional Experience Improves With Age: Evidence Based on Over 10 Years of Experience Sampling (2011, background): “Individuals who are more efficient in reducing amygdala activation associated with negative moods show more adaptive patterns of diurnal cortisol secretion (Urry et al., 2006).”
Amygdala-frontal connectivity during emotion regulation. (2007, methodology): “…activation of prefrontal brain regions, including OFC and rostral ACC, as associated with attenuated amygdala reactivity during emotion regulation (Ochsner et al., 2002; Urry et al., 2006), consistent with the notion that frontal cortex exerts a top–down inhibitory influence on the amygdala.”