New Study: The Brain Can Be Trained to Regulate Negative Emotions

Rebecca Lewis January 23, 2016

A new study, published in the journal NeuroImage, reports that a simple, computer-training task can change the brain’s wiring to regulate emotional reactions. Such findings can be beneficial for those at high risk of developing high blood pressure reactions to emotional information.

The study involved 26 healthy volunteers who were subjected to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing a task in a lab setting. The purpose of the activity was to assess connections between brain regions during no specific task and later during an emotional reactivity task in which they had to ignore negative pictures used to study emotion.

As expected, participants who completed the more intense version of the training (but not the other participants) showed reduced activation in their amygdala, according to Dr Noga Cohen, the lead author of the study.

"In addition, the intense training resulted in increased connectivity between participants’ amygdala and a region in the frontal cortex shown to be involved in emotion regulation,"

"It is our hope that the current work would lead to further testing and potentially the development of effective intervention for individuals suffering from maladaptive emotional behaviour," the researcher notes. "While acknowledging the limitations of this study, which was based on a relatively small number of healthy participants and focused on short-term effects of the training, this may prove effective for individuals suffering from emotion dysregulation."

She added that their findings is the first to demonstrate that non-emotional training that improves the ability to ignore irrelevant information can result in reduced brain reactions to emotional events and alter brain connections.

"These changes were accompanied by strengthened neural connections between brain regions involved in inhibiting emotional reactions." In their previous research, Dr Cohen and her team found that similar training can reduce the tendency to be submersed in a repetitive-thinking cycle about a negative life event.

Source of this article:

Using executive control training to suppress amygdala reactivity to aversive information