Haakon G. Engen | Endogenous emotion generation: Neural architecture and self-regulatory implications

Despite being a ubiquitous part of our emotional lives, emotional states stemming from our thoughts and memories have received comparatively little attention in psychology and affective neuroscience. The current presentation revolves around a series of studies aimed at elucidating the neural component processes of endogenous emotion generation (EnGen) and how this capacity can be used in the service of self regulation.

In the first part of the presentation, a theoretical framework for endogenous emotion generation is presented, highlighting the plausible psychological component processes supporting this capacity, before discussing two studies aimed at elucidating their neural mapping. In a first study, a large (N = 325) sample of the normal population freely generated positive and negative emotional states. fMRI results indicated that EnGen was neurally implemented by cooperation between Salience and Default Mode, Networks, and that these implemented dissociable component processes of core affect generation and multimodal representation formation/integration, respectively. Further, evidence was found that the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was a convergence zone across both affect generation and representation formation, suggesting it plays a key role in the coordination of EnGen. In a second study, the neural correlates of expertise in forms of meditation involving the generation of positive affective states was investigated in a sample (N = 18) of highly practiced meditators. Results showed that 1) activation patterns during this type of meditation largely resembled the three-network structure identified in study 1, and 2) that activation overlapped with increased cortical thickness in the left IFG, in line with the IFG playing a key role in goal-directed EnGen.

The second part of the talk presents a theoretical model for how EnGen can be used in the service of emotional self-regulation, and presents two studies that investigated this. In the first study, based on the large cohort presented above, individual differences in EnGen abilities were shown to mediate the relationship between trait affect and emotion regulation styles, suggesting EnGen is an important, yet overlooked, aspect of emotional self-regulation. The neural underpinnings of such regulation was investigated in a second study, in which the sample of expert meditators used meditation-based positive EnGen and a positive cognitive Reappraisal technique to regulate reactions to negative stimuli. Results showed 1) that meditation-based EnGen showed similar activation to that described iabove, 2) that this was highly dissimilar to regulation via cognitive reappraisal and 3) while both techniques were effective, EnGen primarily increased positive affect, while Reappraisal decreased negative affect. This suggests that a key role of EnGen in self-regulation is enabling the individual to access positive emotion in the face of negative stressors.

Poster