Emotion regulation (ER) is crucial for psychological well-being, influencing daily life, relationships, and mental health. Deficits in ER contribute to disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety. Understanding its neural mechanisms can inform effective interventions to enhance emotional resilience.

This symposium features leading researchers and early career scientists exploring interconnected dimensions of ER:

1. Carmen Morawetz studies interpersonal emotion regulation strategies using fMRI, revealing a tendency to seek social support during intense emotions, which activates the ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex, indicating the neural basis of effective strategies.

2. Birgit Derntl investigates hormonal influences on ER in women, finding that estradiol levels affect brain connectivity, including the effects of oral contraception on ER network connectivity, contributing critical insights into women’s mental health and ER.

3. Katharina Foerster explores ruminative ER in young depression patients. Ruminative ER is correlated with increased amygdala and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activity but diminished connectivity between these regions, indicating regulation challenges.

4. Philipp Kanske presents a training program that boosts positive emotions, like care and concern, to mitigate stress spread. Participants reported enhanced positive social affect when faced with others’ distress and increased cortical thickness in the anterior insular cortex, suggesting benefits for clinical groups under interpersonal stress.

5. Luca Lasogga examines how tDCS brain stimulation reduces aggressive and impulsive behavior by enhancing prefrontal area functionality. Several studies across patient groups were conducted to assess tDCS's effectiveness in controlling aggressive and impulsive responses, noting various influencing factors from methodology to individual differences factors.

When individuals experience distress, they instinctively seek social support to regulate their emotions, a process known as interpersonal emotion regulation (interpersonal ER). This social sharing fulfills a fundamental need for connection, enhancing both psychological and physiological well-being. Despite its significance, the affective determinants guiding interpersonal ER remain underexplored. In this talk, I will present findings from two behavioral experiments that examine how stimulus intensity (high/low) influences the selection and implementation of ER strategies (distraction/reappraisal), both with and without social support (intrapersonal/interpersonal).

Our results reveal a strong tendency for individuals to increasingly seek social support as the intensity of a negative stimulus rises, irrespective of the ER strategy employed. fMRI data further demonstrate heightened activity in the ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex, particularly during the selection and implementation of interpersonal ER. These findings suggest that interpersonal ER engages distinct neural mechanisms compared to intrapersonal ER.

By integrating behavioral and neuroimaging evidence, this talk will provide insights into the mechanisms underlying interpersonal ER and its implications for emotional well-being. Understanding these processes can inform therapeutic interventions and highlight the critical role of social connection in emotion regulation.

Emotion regulation (ER) is essential for psychological well-being, impacting daily life, relationships, and mental health. ER deficits contribute to disorders like depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety. Understanding its neural mechanisms can guide effective interventions. Estradiol (E2) modulates emotion-related neural networks. Using resting-state fMRI, we examined whether E2 influences intrinsic network dynamics linked to ER. In naturally cycling females, E2 administration altered connectivity in ER and reactivity networks, with prefrontal connectivity predicting regulation ability. To explore hormonal influences further, we compared naturally cycling females to those on oral contraceptives (OC) and those starting or stopping OC. In the stopper group, declining synthetic hormones led to connectivity shifts, primarily inhibitory, with the central executive network increasing connectivity toward the default mode and salience networks. Findings highlight the role of steroids in ER and its potential for improving treatments of emotion-related mental disorders.

Ruminative emotion regulation (ER) has been identified as a critical risk factor for early-onset depression. During adolescence and emerging adulthood, the neural emotion processing circuits undergo critical maturational changes. To understand the interplay between rumination and neural emotion processing in the context of early-onset depression, we conducted a longitudinal and preregistered neuroimaging study (https://osf.io/jmxyv).

We investigated 61 right-handed participants, 28 MDD patients and 33 healthy controls (55 female, M = 36.14 years, SD = 13.29) with fMRI at baseline and after two years. During both fMRI sessions, participants underwent an affective priming task that assessed emotion processing of subliminally presented sad compared to neutral facial expressions. A group × time ANCOVA with rumination as covariate was performed for the amygdala and lateral prefrontal cortices as region-of-interest. We also explored task-based functional connectivity between the lateral prefrontal cortices and amygdala employing a PPI-analysis.

We found main effects of ruminative ER on amygdala and vlPFC activity as well as an explorative groupxrumination interaction on amygdala-vlPFC-connectivity: Elevated amygdala and vlPFC-activity were associated with increased ruminative tendencies in both, patients with MDD and HC. However, rumination was associated with increased amygdala-vlPFC-connectivity in healthy participants, in contrast to decreased connectivity in patients with MDD.

Our longitudinal neuroimaging study revealed that increased emotional reactivity toward negative stimuli and increased effort to regulate this reactivity is associated with habitual rumination in young people with and without depression. Importantly, early-onset depression may lead to a dysfunction of this regulation effort, as indicated by the decreased functional connectivity in young patients with depression.

Our social networks are source of resilience but can also transmit stress and psychopathology. This talk will present a positive social affect training that aims to counter stress transmission by increasing social emotions of care and concern. The results do indeed show post-training subjective increases in such positive social affect when confronted with other people under stress. They go along with increased cortical thickness in the anterior insular cortex. The training may be adapted to clinical populations experiencing higher levels of interpersonal stress.

Harm resulting from reactive aggression burdens both victims and society and is ineffectively addressed by current interventions. Non-invasive brain stimulation methods, such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), have shown promise in reducing aggression. Conventional anodal tDCS has been shown to modulate aggression but is thought to lack regional specificity. High-definition tDCS (HD-tDCS) offers higher precision in modulating neural excitability. Yet, the limited deployment of HD-tDCS leaves uncertainty about its effectiveness. Therefore, we investigated the effect of anodal HD-tDCS over the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG), which is associated with behavioral control, to mitigate reactive aggression. Thirty-nine healthy participants were randomly assigned to either anodal stimulation for 20 minutes of 1.5 mA or to sham stimulation. The electrodes were positioned according to the 10-20 system. The target electrode was placed on F6 surrounded by reference electrodes located at TP8, PZ, FC3 and FP1. Subsequently, participants played the Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP) against a fake opponent. We hypothesized that after active stimulation (compared to sham), participants chose lower punishment levels for their opponent. Our results showed no overall effect of HD-tDCS on aggressive behavior. However, an interaction between HD-tDCS and provocation level was observed, suggesting that participants receiving active HD-tDCS chose lower punishment in response to provocation compared to the sham group. In conclusion, anodal HD-tDCS over the rIFG was associated with lower reactivity to provocation.