Cognitive Neuroscience Society

The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
MENUMENU
  • Home
  • Annual Meeting
        • General Information
          • What to Expect at CNS 2023
          • CNS 2023 Mobile App
          • CNS 2023 Giveaway
          • CNS 2023 Giveaway Winners
          • Accessibility at CNS
          • General Information
          • Code of Conduct
          • Dates and Deadlines
          • Hotel Reservations
          • Poster Guidelines
          • Poster Printing Discount
          • Annual Meeting Workshop Policy & Application
          • Exhibit with us!
        • Program
          • Thank you to our Partners
          • CNS 2023 Program Booklet
          • Schedule Overview
          • Program-at-a-Glance
          • CNS 30th Anniversary Dance Party
          • Keynote Address
          • George A. Miller Awardee
          • Distinguished Career Contributions Awardee
          • Young Investigator Awardees
          • CNS at 30: Perspectives on the Roots, Present, and Future of Cognitive Neuroscience
          • Invited-Symposium Sessions
          • Symposium Sessions
          • Data Blitz Session Schedule
          • Poster Schedule & Session Information
          • JoCN Travel Fellowship Award
          • GSA/PFA Award Winners
          • Workshops, Socials & Special Events
        • Registration
          • Registration
          • Registration FAQ
          • Registration Policies, Cancellations & Refunds
        • News/Press
          • CNS 2023 Press Room
          • CNS 2022 Blog
          • CNS 2021 Blog
          • CNS 2020 Blog
        • Submissions
          • 2023 Poster Printing Discount
          • Submission Requirements
          • Submit a Poster
          • Submit a Symposium
          • GSA or PFA Application
          • Data Blitz
          • Frequently Asked Submission Questions
        • Archive
          • CNS 2020 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2019 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2018 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2017 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2016 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2015 Conference Videos
          • Previous Meetings Programs & Abstracts
  • About CNS
    • Boards and Committees
    • CNS Statement: Black Lives Matter
  • Membership
    • Information and Benefits
    • Join or Renew Membership
    • Membership FAQs
    • Member Discounts
    • Newsletter
      • Submit an Announcement
      • Current Newsletter
      • Newsletter FAQs
      • Past Newsletters
  • Awards
    • George A. Miller Award
    • Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award
    • Young Investigator Award
    • Young Investigator Award Nominations
    • 2023 YIA Nomination Form
    • JoCN Travel Fellowship Award
  • News Center
    • CNS Blog
    • CNS 2023 Press Room
    • CNS 2023 Blog
    • CNS 2022 Blog
    • CNS 2021 Blog
    • CNS 2020 Blog
    • CNS 2019 Blog
    • Blog Archives
    • Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter
    • Media Contact
  • My CNS
  • Contact Us
post

CNS 2013 Meeting: Controlling Emotional Response is Key to Treating Mental Illness

April 15, 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4ML5ymlCFA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4ML5ymlCFA

Everyone attending CNS 2013’s first symposium Sunday morning on the regulation of emotion and mental illness took part in a group belly laugh when James Gross played a video to open his talk. In the clip, a newscaster nervously interviews an animal handler holding a 5-foot snake. Unbeknownst to the viewers (and perhaps the newscaster), a lizard sits quietly on the table in front of them. A moment later, it leaps and attaches itself to the newscaster’s sport coat. Completely flummoxed, he belts out a few awkward screams before collapsing to the floor in fright.

Despite the fright, the newscaster survives to see another broadcast. He stands up right away and guffaws his way through an explanation of his reaction. But that reaction is the very reason Gross, of Stanford University, chose the video: to demonstrate that emotional responses are often uncontrollable. But opportunities for understanding and treating mental illnesses lie in controlling emotional response, as the symposium’s four speakers can attest.

Gross contextualized the talks by pointing out that more than 50 percent of psychiatric disorders have some sort of emotional disruption component. For example, patients with social anxiety disorder have a heightened, negative emotional response to social situations.

More than a decade of research into what’s called “reappraisal” has examined what happens in the brain when a researcher asks a subject to respond to a negative stimulus by mulling it over and finding a new way to look at it. In healthy subjects at least, reappraisal decreases the negative impact of that stimulus. Gross and his colleagues found that patients with a mental illness such as social anxiety disorder had trouble activating the parts of their brains – primarily in the prefrontal cortex – that allow those without such afflictions to recharacterize tough situations. The upshot of these findings is that deficiencies in this system may be responsible for mental illness, and these processes provide points to treat these issues.

“As emotions unfold, we can intervene at multiple points,” Gross said. “Reappraisal is one of these points – a particularly interesting one that may play a crucial role in social anxiety.”

Regina Lapate, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, echoed the value of cognitive reappraisal and took its application a step further. By measuring pupil dilation and conductance in the skin as indicators of emotional response, Lapate showed that subjects’ ability to regulate their emotional responses strongly correlated with how well they could modulate their responses to physical pain. Both types of stimuli also activated the same parts of the amygdala.

Karina Blair of the National Institute of Mental Health had focused much of her research on the top-down attention carried out in the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain. Rather than just responding to external stimuli as in bottom-up attention, top-down attention is under the person’s control: the driving force for the attention comes from within and thus is important in reappraisal. Blair presented evidence that patients with anxiety disorders, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), had trouble energizing the portions of their brain involved in this process. Interestingly, when she and her team examined subjects who had face a serious trauma in their lives but did not develop PTSD, they found very high levels of activity in the reappraisal centers of the brain, much higher than even healthy individuals.

“This raises the very exciting possibility that perhaps with a superior top-down attentional system could actually function as a buffer – as protection against the development of PTSD,” Blair told the audience, though she acknowledged that they still hadn’t fleshed out the cause for this connection.

Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin rounded out the panel with a primer on the three R’s of emotion regulation – the other two being reactivity and recovery. His team’s research compared activation (and reactivation) in two parts of the brain, the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), in healthy individuals and those who suffer from depression. Patients with depression had trouble sustaining the activity in the NAcc found in healthy patients, but anti-depressants helped keep that activity level up.

Further research demonstrated that interventions, particularly in childhood, could strengthen the sort of attention that staves off the negative emotional responses that are characteristic of depression. Davidson pointed out that those early intercessions actually have the potential to alter not just the functions, but also the structures, of key areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

—
More than 1,500 scientists are attending the 20th annual meeting of CNS in San Francisco, CA, from April 13 to April 16,2013. Follow the meeting on Twitter: @CogNeuroNews #CNS2013

Media advisory

By lmunoz Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: emotion, mental illness Leave a Comment

Previous article: CNS 2013 Meeting: Making Decisions Based on Context: A New Mechanism Gains Traction
Next article: CNS 2013 Press Release: Training the Brain to Improve on New Tasks

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Recent Posts

  • CNS 2023: Day 4 Highlights
  • Psychedelics and Cognition: A New Look
  • CNS 2023: Day 3 Highlights
  • CNS 2023: Day 2 Highlights
  • Forget About It: Investigating How We Purge Thoughts from Our Minds

Blog Archives

Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter

Cognitive Neuroscience Society
c/o Center for Mind and Brain
267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95618
916-955-6080: for CNS Membership Questions
805-450-7490: for annual meeting questions about- registration, posters, symposium
916-409-5069: Fax Line
email: meeting@cogneurosociety.org

Recent Posts

  • CNS 2023: Day 4 Highlights
  • Psychedelics and Cognition: A New Look
  • CNS 2023: Day 3 Highlights
  • CNS 2023: Day 2 Highlights
  • Forget About It: Investigating How We Purge Thoughts from Our Minds

Archives

Blog Archives

Previous Meeting Programs and Abstracts

Past Newsletters

All contents © Cognitive Neuroscience Society 1995-2019

Add to Calendar

Add to Calendar
04/16/2022 11:00 AM
04/16/2022 12:00 PM
America/Los_Angeles
How Prior Knowledge Shapes Encoding of New Memories
Description of the event
Grand Ballroom A
Create an Account

Login Utility