Brain Activity During Emotion Regulation Predicts Working Memory Performance

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Scarlett Horner¹ (horners@myumanitoba.ca), Roshni Lulla², Helen Wu², Shruti Shaktivel², Anthony Vaccaro², Ellen Herschel², Leonardo Christov-Moore², Colin McDaniel², Jonas Kaplan², Steven G. Greening¹; ¹University of Manitoba, ²University of Southern California

Working memory (WM) ability may be a crucial cognitive process underpinning emotion regulation. Previous research has found that working memory is associated with emotion regulation ability (Hendricks & Buchanan, 2016; Opitz et al., 2014; Schmeichel and Tang, 2015). The purpose of this study is to identify whether brain activity associated with emotion regulation can be used to predict individual differences in WM. We predicted that brain activity associated with reappraising negative images compared to viewing negative images would be observed in regions typically associated with WM and that activity in these regions would be related to individual differences in WM. One-hundred-one participants completed an emotion regulation fMRI task followed by the WAIS-IV, with performance on WM tasks being of interest. A standard univariate whole brain analysis contrasting the reappraise negative - view negative BOLD response found greater activity in parts of lateral frontoparietal networks typically associated with reappraisal, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). A subsequent covariate analysis revealed that whereas covarying for individual differences in WM removed all significant whole brain effects, the right dlPFC positively covaried with individual differences in WM (cluster threshold, z > 3.1; whole brain cluster corrected p < .05). Multivariate analyses further demonstrated the ability to predict individual differences in WM from brain activity during emotion regulation. It is likely that working memory and emotion regulation are at least partially underpinned by similar neurocognitive mechanisms.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions