Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affectVan Reekum, C. M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1516-1101, Johnstone, T., Urry, H. L., Thurow, M. E., Schaefer, H. S., Alexander, A. L. and Davidson, R. J. (2007) Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affect. NeuroImage, 36 (3). pp. 1041-1055. ISSN 1095-9572 Full text not archived in this repository. It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing. To link to this item DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.03.052 Abstract/SummaryRecent studies have identified a distributed network of brain regions thought to support cognitive reappraisal processes underlying emotion regulation in response to affective images, including parieto-temporal regions and lateral/medial regions of prefrontal cortex (PFC). A number of these commonly activated regions are also known to underlie visuospatial attention and oculomotor control, which raises the possibility that people use attentional redeployment rather than, or in addition to, reappraisal as a strategy to regulate emotion. We predicted that a significant portion of the observed variance in brain activation during emotion regulation tasks would be associated with differences in how participants visually scan the images while regulating their emotions. We recorded brain activation using fMRI and quantified patterns of gaze fixation while participants increased or decreased their affective response to a set of affective images. fMRI results replicated previous findings on emotion regulation with regulation differences reflected in regions of PFC and the amygdala. In addition, our gaze fixation data revealed that when regulating, individuals changed their gaze patterns relative to a control condition. Furthermore, this variation in gaze fixation accounted for substantial amounts of variance in brain activation. These data point to the importance of controlling for gaze fixation in studies of emotion regulation that use visual stimuli.
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