First brain imaging study of emotion is “disgusting”

William Atkins
Wednesday, 19 March 2008 21:54

Science - Health

Some of the clips are very disgusting in nature, showing scenes of "surgical procedures, vomiting and animal slaughter."

Stanford psychologist James J. Gross, also an author of the paper, states, "It's pretty awful stuff." Gross adds, "In order to understand what happens when people control intense emotions in everyday life, we needed to induce potent emotions in the scanner so that we could see what parts of the brain are activated both by the emotion itself and by the efforts to regulate that emotion."

The researchers found that the amygdale and the insula, two regions of the brain that are involved with reactions and emotions, contained the most activity when viewing the disgusting scenes.

Howver, they found that the amount of activity of these two brain areas differed depending on which technique—cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression—was used by the subjects to cope with their emotions.

Cognitive reappraisal (thinking of good things associated with the disgusting scene) reduced negative emotions of the subjects very quickly. However, expressive suppression (toughing it out) resulted in an increase in the neural activity within the amygdale and insula.

Thus, only cognitive reappraisal helped subjects reduce their emotional reactions to the disgusting scene. Expressive suppression led to more stress in the subjects.

Gross states, “These two forms of regulation work quite differently. Early forms of [cognitive] regulation, such as reappraisal, effectively shut down the emotion at relatively little cost."

However, for expressive suppression, Gross stated, "Although you can look cool as a cucumber, you actually get physiologically even more activated than you would have been if you had just let the emotion play itself out."

The researchers hope to develop better ways to understand how humans react to bad situations to provide more effective therapies, especially for health disorders such as social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Also associated with the study are Kateri McRae, and Wiveka Ramel.

This article is based on the March 14, 2008 Stanford University (California, U.S.A.) article by Louis Bergeron called “Disgusting videos used to study coping methods (Researchers conduct first-ever brain imaging study directly contrasting two techniques of emotion regulation).