Implicit induction of emotional control—A comparative fMRI investigation of self-control and reappraisal goal pursuit

Implicit forms of emotion regulation are of growing interest and have been shown to be efficient in controlling emotional responses despite the fact that they operate without conscious awareness of the ongoing regulatory process and deliberate attempts to influence emotional responding. Although such forms of affective modulation are considered natural and crucial for mental health, their brain mechanisms have hardly been studied until now. Here, we employ a novel procedure and compare directly brain responses to emotional stimuli after implicitly inducing either a self-control goal or a reappraisal goal with a scrambled sentence task. Both induction methods showed robust attenuation of visual, attentional, and emotion-related brain networks. Moreover, after induction of the self-control goal we observed increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the right insula, which are involved in top-down modulation of emotional responses. Reappraisal goal induction led to weaker activation in the right dlPFC, which was localized similarly as in the self-control induction task. Our results not only confirm the effectiveness of implicit induction of affective control, but also indicate the important similarities in underlying neural mechanisms that are putatively shared with conscious forms of emotional regulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).