Dedifferentiation of emotion regulation strategies in the aging brain

Abstract

Different emotion regulation strategies are distinctly represented in the brains of younger adults. Decreasing a reaction to a negative situation by reinterpreting it (reappraisal) relies on cognitive control regions in the prefrontal cortex, while distracting away from a stressor involves more posterior medial structures. In this study, we used Multi-Voxel pattern analyses (MVPA) to examine whether reappraisal and distraction strategies have distinct representations in the older adult brain, or whether emotion regulation strategies become more dedifferentiated in later life. MVPA better differentiated the two emotion regulation strategies for younger adults than for older adults, and revealed the greatest age-related differences in differentiation in the posterior medial cortex (PMC). Univariate analyses revealed equal PMC recruitment across strategies for older adults, but greater activity during distraction than reappraisal for younger adults. The PMC is central to self-focused processing, and thus our findings are consistent with the possibility that focusing on the self may be a default mechanism across emotion regulation strategies for older people.

Keywords: aging; dedifferentiation; distraction; emotion regulation; reappraisal.

Fig. 1.

Emotion regulation task schematic. Subjects performed four runs of the task. Each run was composed of one distract and one reappraise block, and each block contained eight trials of the same strategy type. Prior to each block, subjects were cued to which strategy they would be utilizing at each block start, and were reminded of the strategy meaning. On each trial, participants viewed a negative emotional image on either the left or right side of the screen (counterbalanced), and were presented with the strategy cue on the opposite side. Emotion regulation was sustained throughout the 10-s image duration. At the end of the trial, subjects rated the perceived intensity of the image post-regulation on a 4-item Likert scale.

Fig. 2.

Number of items freely recalled by strategy condition. For both older and younger adults, items encountered in the reappraise condition were more frequently recalled than items seen in the distract condition.

Fig. 3.

Mean percent signal change for distraction and reappraisal across age groups. (A). Searchlight results of regions in PMC more effective at classifying strategies for younger than older adults, FWE= Family-wise error corrected (FWE-corrected) at P < 0.001 (B). Traditional GLM age-by-condition interactions reveal areas within PMC and supramarginal gyrus, cluster-thresholded z = 2.3, P < 0.05. (C). Post-hoc extraction of percent signal change from the cluster of regions included in the GLM interaction map for each subject was conducted for contrasts of Distract>Baseline and Reappraisal> Baseline.