Fear is only as deep as the mind allows: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on the regulation of negative affect

By E. Diekhof, Katharina Geier, P. Falkai, O. Gruber. NeuroImage, 2011

418 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Humans have the ability to control negative affect and perceived fear. Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether this affect regulation capacity relies on a common neural mechanism in different experimental domains. Here, we sought to identify commonalities in regulatory brain activation in the domains of fear extinction, placebo, and cognitive emotion regulation. Using coordinate-based activation-likelihood estimation meta-analysis we intended to elucidate concordant hyperactivations and the associated deactivations in the three experimental domains, when human subjects successfully diminished negative affect. Our data show that only one region in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) controlled negative affective responses and reduced the degree of subjectively perceived unpleasantness independent of the experimental domain. This down-regulation of negative affect was further accompanied by a concordant reduction of activation in the left amygdala. Finally, the soothing effect of placebo treatments and cognitive reappraisal strategies, but not extinction retrieval, was specifically accompanied by a coherent hyperactivation in the anterior cingulate and the insular cortex. Collectively, our data strongly imply that the human VMPFC may represent a domain-general controller of perceived fear and aversiveness that modulates negative affective responses in phylogenetically older structures of the emotion processing system. In addition, higher-level regulation strategies may further engage complementary neural resources to effectively deal with the emotion-eliciting events.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da7c3b748764f8ef0c1d3db45385a49f492a89a3

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Neural network of cognitive emotion regulation — An ALE meta-analysis and MACM analysis (2013, background): “A recent meta-analysis found the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to be critically involved in the regulation of negative affect in different domains (Diekhof et al., 2011).”
Don't fear ‘fear conditioning’: Methodological considerations for the design and analysis of studies on human fear acquisition, extinction, and return of fear (2017, neutral): “, 2006), and meta-analyses (Diekhof et al., 2011; Fullana et al., 2015; Mechias et al., 2010) that provide a comprehensive source of reference with respect to the neural networks involved in fear conditioning.”
Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. (2014, methodology): “mediated emotional control (Ochsner and Gross 2005, 2007; Schiller and Delgado 2010; Diekhof et al. 2011; Etkin et al. 2011), but instead may act though the lateral temporal cortex, an area associated with semantic and perceptual representation.”
Common and differential neural networks of emotion regulation by Detachment, Reinterpretation, Distraction, and Expressive Suppression: A comparative fMRI investigation (2014, background): “…cortex (VLPFC), the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are discussed as common brain regions supporting emotion control in general (Buhle et al., 2013; Diekhof et al., 2011; Dolcos et al., 2011; McRae et al., 2010; Ochsner et al., 2012; Phillips et al., 2008).”