Brain scans of 2,175 people find no single neural signature of emotional control

The idea that the front of the brain acts as a brake on emotion, and that people who regulate their feelings well show more of that braking activity, is a familiar one in both neuroscience and popular psychology. A large analysis published in Nature suggests the picture is less tidy. Pooling 40 brain-imaging datasets covering 2,175 participants, the authors report that three common ways of measuring a person's ability to regulate emotions do not agree with one another. None of them tracks activity in the prefrontal circuits usually credited with the job.

The study focuses on cognitive reappraisal: changing how one thinks about a situation in order to change its emotional impact. The authors describe reappraisal as central to well-being. Earlier work has shown that it engages regulatory circuits in the prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead involved in planning and control. That has encouraged an assumption that activity in these circuits reflects how capable someone is at regulating their emotions. According to the paper, evidence for this assumption has been inconclusive and has not been established at scale.

To test it, the researchers worked as a preregistered consortium. They committed publicly to their hypotheses and methods before seeing the results, a safeguard against selectively reporting favourable findings. They drew on task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which infers brain activity from changes in blood flow while people perform a task in the scanner. They then compared three widely used indicators of reappraisal capacity. The first was questionnaires about people's general tendencies, known as trait measures. The second was people's own ratings of how they felt during the task. The third was down-regulation of the amygdala, a pair of structures deep in the brain long associated with emotional responses, whose activity is expected to fall when reappraisal succeeds.

The three indicators did not converge on a common core, the authors report, which suggests they may not be capturing the same underlying ability. None of them showed the expected link with prefrontal regulatory circuits either. Questionnaire scores showed no detectable association with brain activity anywhere. Task ratings did relate to brain responses, but in the amygdala and the sensorimotor cortices, areas involved in sensing and moving the body, rather than in prefrontal control regions. The authors also examined the mental processes themselves rather than differences between people. They found that the canonical control circuits were active both while emotions were being generated and while they were being reappraised. That, they argue, challenges the presumption that these circuits are specific to emotion regulation.

The authors conclude that activation in supposedly regulatory brain regions should not be used to infer how well a particular person manages their emotions. They point to implications for proposed neural biomarkers, measurable brain signals meant to indicate a trait or condition. The findings also bear on interventions, and on psychoeducation that explains emotional difficulties as deficits in specific brain regions. Two questions remain open. The first is what each of the three indicators measures, if not a single shared capacity. The second is whether anything in the brain reliably reflects individual differences in regulating emotion.