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Neurobiological Effects of Context on Emotion Regulation Neurobiological Effects of Context on Emotion Regulation The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Shermohammed, Maheen. 2019. Neurobiological Effects of Context on Emotion Regulation. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42029802 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Neurobiological Effects of Context on Emotion Regulation A dissertation presented by Maheen Shermohammed to The Department of Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Psychology Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2019 © 2019 Maheen Shermohammed All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Leah Somerville Maheen Shermohammed Neurobiological Effects of Context on Emotion Regulation Abstract The ability to regulate emotions is a critical feature of healthy psychological functioning. It is therefore essential to understand under what conditions different emotion regulation strategies may or may not be effective. Neurobiological evidence suggests that certain contexts, including acute psychological stress and sleep deprivation, may impair emotion regulation ability. However, there is little data on the causal effects of these contexts on emotion regulation processing. In this dissertation, I present three studies that examine the neurobiological effects of stress and sleep deprivation on two emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal and affect labeling. In Paper 1, we induced acute psychosocial stress and measured its impact (relative to a control manipulation) on emotional responding during a cognitive reappraisal task while participants underwent fMRI. Findings revealed no evidence that stress modulated the effects of cognitive reappraisal on subjective or physiological measures of emotional responding. Modest effects of stress on reappraisal-related neural activation were observed in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, but these relationships were statistically fragile. These findings were extended in Paper 2, in which we tested the effects of one night of total sleep deprivation on the same cognitive reappraisal task. Once again, results showed no evidence that the context manipulation (this time sleep deprivation) affected subjective, physiological, or neural responses to cognitive reappraisal. However, it was not the case that these null effects generalized to all types of iii emotion regulation. In Paper 3, we examined the effects of sleep deprivation on affect labeling, an implicit emotion regulation strategy hypothesized to rely on the cognitive control functions of the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Findings revealed up-regulated recruitment of this prefrontal region as well as increased functional connectivity with the amygdala during sleep deprivation. Increased coupling was associated with lower baseline negative affect when sleep deprived, suggesting that sleep-loss-induced increases in activation may have adaptive buffering effects on mood. Together, findings from these papers show that two context manipulations expected to impair emotion regulation ability do not appear to impact cognitive reappraisal, despite influencing the processing of a more implicit emotion regulation strategy. This work calls for a careful examination of the way emotion regulation is presently studied and whether cognitive reappraisal, or only certain aspects of it, may in fact be robust to the effects of contextual factors like stress and sleep deprivation. ! ! ! ! iv Table of Contents Background and Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 Paper 1: Does psychosocial stress impact cognitive reappraisal? Behavioral and neural evidence ..................................................................................................................... 12 Paper 2: Neurobiological effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive reappraisal .................. 44 Paper 3: Neurobiological effects of sleep deprivation on affect labeling ............................ 68 General Discussion and Conclusion ..................................................................................... 89 References ............................................................................................................................. 97 Appendix .............................................................................................................................. 112 v Acknowledgments I would first like to extend my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Leah Somerville, for creating an environment where I could grow fearlessly as a scientist and providing nothing but support along the way. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Drs. Liz Phelps and Kate McLaughlin for their time and extremely helpful discussion, and Dr. Randy Buckner, for his infectious curiosity and for showing me how discoveries are made. I am very grateful to the members of the Affective Neuroscience and Developmental Lab, who are each brilliant scientists and even better people. I would especially like to thank Hayley Dorfman, Katie Insel, and Alex Rodman for being my safety net; their support and friendship has meant the world to me. Thank you to the funding sources that generously supported this research, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center. Finally, my loving thanks to my family, who taught me that knowledge was something to be held in the highest regard, and to Jack, for being my best friend and biggest fan. vi Background and Introduction Emotions can play a highly adaptive role, helping us form attachments, avoid threats, communicate our thoughts and intentions, and generally respond quickly to situations in our environment (Ekman, 1992; Frijda, 1986; Keltner & Gross, 1999; Oatley & Jenkins, 2003). However, sometimes emotional responses in the moment do not align with our higher order goals, like giggling during a serious lecture or yelling at a frustrating coworker, and in such situations we may attempt to modify or regulate them. Understanding emotion regulation is critical, as it plays a key role in healthy psychological functioning. For example, successful emotion regulation can confer beneficial academic and social outcomes in daily life. In students, a greater capacity to regulate an emotional response is associated with higher GPA, standardized achievement scores, and teacher reports of academic achievement and productivity, above and beyond the effects of IQ (Graziano, Reavis, Keane, & Calkins, 2007; Gumora & Arsenio, 2002). Adaptive regulation is also associated with higher competence in peer relationships, improved quality of social relationships, and greater prosocial tendencies (Contreras, Kerns, Weimer, Gentzler, & Tomich, 2000; Lopes, Salovey, Coté, & Beers, 2005). Meanwhile, maladaptive emotion regulation tendencies are frequently associated with psychopathology. Individuals with depression tend to use less effective and often even counter- productive strategies to regulate their emotions (Berking & Wupperman, 2012; Campbell-Sills, Barlow, Brown, & Hofmann, 2006; Ehring, Tuschen-Caffier, Schnülle, Fischer, & Gross, 2010; Liverant, Brown, Barlow, & Roemer, 2008), and this profile of aberrant emotion regulation has been linked to deficits in inhibiting the processing of negative material (Joormann & Gotlib, 2010). Anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have similarly been linked to deficits in the use or efficacy of adaptive emotion 1 regulation strategies (Tull, Barrett, McMillan, & Roemer, 2007; Tull, Stipelman, Salters- Pedneault, & Gratz, 2009). Longitudinal studies of individuals with depression and anxiety show that maladaptive emotion regulation attitudes and tendencies predict disease prognosis (Kassel, Bornovalova, & Mehta, 2007; Kraaij, Pruymboom, & Garnefski, 2002), and that interventions targeting these factors can improve health outcomes (Cloitre, Koenen, Cohen, & Han, 2002; Kumar, Feldman, & Hayes, 2008). Together, this work suggests that a better understanding of emotion regulation can shed light on healthy emotional functioning and reveal cognitive processes that may contribute to symptoms of psychopathology. Emotion regulation strategies To date, a great deal of research has been dedicated to investigating how emotion regulation can be implemented adaptively, examining what types of emotion regulation strategies are most effective. One emotion regulation strategy that has received immense empirical attention is cognitive reappraisal (CR), which involves re-interpreting the content of an emotional stimulus in a way that changes its meaning. For example, someone who is frustrated at getting lost could reappraise the situation as an opportunity to enjoy the scenery in a new part of town. CR is considered a highly effective method of reducing negative affect (i.e. changes in subjective feeling states). When compared to passively experiencing affect or attempting to suppress it, CR is more effective at
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