Prefrontal cortex activity fails to predict individual emotion regulation

A supervisor criticizes a report in front of the entire team – you feel exposed and hurt. But if you tell yourself, "She takes my work seriously and wants the project to succeed," the same situation can lose some of its intensity. In psychology, this deliberate reinterpretation is called cognitive reappraisal. In the lab, it is usually studied by asking participants to reinterpret distressing images in a way that makes them seem less upsetting.

Cognitive reappraisal is one of the most extensively studied forms of emotion regulation. The capacity to regulate emotions appropriately in a given situation is crucial for mental health, and reappraisal itself is a core element of cognitive behavioral therapy. For years, brain imaging studies have shown that regions of the prefrontal cortex are particularly active during reappraisal. It was concluded from this that the strength of this activation also reveals how well an individual can regulate their emotions. It is precisely this conclusion that the new study calls into question.

32 research teams led by the CIMH

To provide a reliable answer to this question, 32 research teams, led by Dr. Maurizio Sicorello of the Central Institute for Mental Health (CIMH), joined forces to form the international consortium NIDER (Neurobiology of Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation). Together with Prof. Dr. Carmen Morawetz from the University of Innsbruck and Jenny Zähringer from the CIMH, Sicorello designed the study and compiled 40 fMRI datasets involving up to 2,175 participants. Nine of these datasets had not been published previously. The sample size is thus approximately 20 times larger than the largest sample reported in a recent review article on this topic. The participating teams analyzed their data according to a pre-registered, standardized protocol. Sicorello then synthesized the results in the main analyses.

Prefrontal activity does not allow for conclusions about the individual

The key finding: The level of activity in the prefrontal regions during the reevaluation did not indicate how well individual participants were able to regulate their emotions.

Changing our own feelings by looking at a situation in a new light is more than just flexing a mental 'muscle' that some people simply have better trained. What may be more decisive is which interpretations of a situation come naturally to us given our life history, whether we even look for alternatives in everyday life, and whether we consider them credible."

Dr. Maurizio Sicorello, lead author of the study and director of the NIDER Consortium at the CIMH

"That doesn't mean the prefrontal cortex isn't important for emotion regulation," emphasizes Carmen Morawetz, professor of affective neuroscience at the University of Innsbruck and the study's last author. "Within a single person, brain activity can certainly reveal how emotions change. But when comparing people, we run into limitations – possibly because different people apparently use different neural pathways to arrive at the same result."

Three measurements, no common denominator

The researchers compared three common indicators of a person's emotional regulation: self-report data from a questionnaire; participants' reports of how much their emotional experience changed during the reevaluation while in the scanner; and the resulting decrease in activity in the amygdala – a brain region that processes emotionally significant stimuli.

If all three measures were reflecting the same capacity, they would have to be closely correlated. That was not the case. Only a correlation was found between the reported emotional experience and amygdala activity. However, this correlation was so weak that a single study with more than 1,000 participants would be necessary to reliably demonstrate it. The tendency to reevaluate, as measured by the questionnaire, did not correlate with either of the other two measures or with brain activity.

One possible explanation: Questionnaires measure how people assess their own behavior in everyday life. In the scanner, on the other hand, it is precisely specified when and how they should reassess their behavior. Those who benefit from the strategy in everyday life may not actually be implementing it any better, but rather are better at recognizing when it helps.

Body awareness and motor skills take center stage

Participants who were better able to reduce their negative emotions through reappraisal showed slightly lower activity in sensorimotor brain regions – which are involved, among other things, in body awareness and movement – as well as in attention networks. There was also evidence involving the amygdala and the brainstem – regions that are more commonly associated with the generation of emotions than with their regulation. However, these effects were very small and depended in part on which studies were included in the analysis.

"This is particularly exciting because we've already found similar evidence in a parallel large-scale study on susceptibility to stress," says Sicorello. Further studies will have to show whether there is an overarching principle behind this.

Why it is difficult to compare brain activity across people

The study also reveals a fundamental methodological problem: People differ significantly in how strongly their brains respond overall to a task – for example, due to differences in blood flow, measurement noise, or head movements inside the scanner. If a person's brain responds more strongly in one region than in others, the rest of the brain also shows stronger activation. Thus, an increased amygdala response during reevaluation was not accompanied by weaker activity in prefrontal regions, but rather by stronger activity – contrary to what standard models predict. The same pattern was observed in another dataset for tasks involving pain and cognitive control.

"This is an uncomfortable but important insight for our field," says Morawetz. "Interpreting individual brain regions in isolation as markers of a person's capacity to regulate emotions falls short, especially in clinical research, where reduced prefrontal activity is often considered a sign of impaired emotional regulation. We need more realistic, personally relevant tasks and evaluation methods that take such global differences into account."