A five-week training intervention taught college students to better regulate their emotions in response to negative events, a new study finds. After the training, the students reported less emotional distress when viewing negative images or thinking about difficult events from their own lives, and brain scans revealed corresponding changes in the spontaneous functional connectivity of their brains.
The findings are detailed in the journal Scientific Reports.
The new work builds on insights from a 2021 study of emotional resilience in veterans. That study trained the veterans to use two emotion-regulation strategies: one in which they focused their attention on neutral contextual features of photos or memories of negative events, and the other a method called “cognitive reappraisal,” which involved reflecting on the potentially positive dimensions of otherwise distressing memories or images. The veterans who were trained in these techniques experienced less emotional distress in response to the memories and images afterward, the researchers found. Functional MRI brain scans also showed changes in how the trainees processed cognitive and emotional information.
“After seeing promising results in veterans, we extended the intervention to college students,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign psychology professor Sanda Dolcos, who led the new work with Kelly Hohl, a postdoctoral resident at the Phoenix VA Healthcare Center, and U. of I. psychology professor Florin Dolcos. “We wanted to know whether training in the flexible use of focused attention and cognitive reappraisal could help young adults develop more adaptive responses to stress, while also uncovering the cognitive mechanisms supporting resilience.”
The researchers wanted to test the same emotion-regulation techniques in young people experiencing low-level chronic stress at a time in their lives when brain systems supporting self-regulation continue to mature. While veterans face significant stress, including trauma-related symptoms, college students encounter different but important challenges related to academic demands, social transitions and emerging adulthood, Sanda Dolcos said.
For the focused-attention training, “we taught the college students to focus on the background of certain emotional images,” she said. “We directed them to look more at the neutral, more contextual aspects of a scene.”
In a photo of a traffic accident, for example, participants might practice focusing on background elements such as trees, intact cars on the roadway or a blue sky.
“Eye-tracking research has shown that emotion regulation is reflected in modulations of gaze patterns,” the researchers wrote. Reducing one’s fixation on the emotional parts of an image and turning one’s attention to neutral background elements has been found to aid in regulating emotions.
For the cognitive reappraisal training, researchers asked participants to practice reinterpreting potentially negative emotional situations in a more positive light. These situations included those depicted in photos provided by the researchers as well as the students’ own experiences.
The participants engaged in the training exercises twice a week for five weeks. The researchers also encouraged them to practice the emotion-regulation techniques in their daily lives.
Before and after the training, the students answered questions about their mood, levels of anxiety and worry and potential PTSD symptoms. Most of those in the training group also underwent neuroimaging scans while awake but not engaged in a task. This approach captures a person’s spontaneous, or resting state “functional connectivity,” a baseline measure of how various brain regions communicate with one another.
Follow-up questionnaires, eye-tracking patterns and brain scans revealed that participants were increasingly engaged in the focused attention method and relied less on cognitive reappraisal. The trainees experienced less emotional distress in response to negative images and memories at the end of the five weeks than at the beginning, and less than those in the control group, who were not trained. They spent less time looking at emotionally charged areas of pictures without being prompted to do so.
The brain scans revealed significant changes in the way different brain networks were communicating, with more reliance on “top-down” versus “bottom-up” processing after the training, the researchers said.
Top-down processing involves several brain structures, many in the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain behind the forehead, while bottom-up processing engages the limbic system, including brain regions like the amygdala, which lie deeper within the brain, the researchers said.
“Bottom-up processing helps us detect and respond to important information in our environment; whereas top-down processing allows us to intentionally guide our attention and responses based on our goals,” Hohl said. “For adaptive functioning, the brain needs to flexibly balance both processes.”
The brain scans of trained individuals revealed more connectivity in parts of the prefrontal cortex, and “a reduction in the sensitivity of regions associated with negative emotions” after the training, Florin Dolcos said. The training also led to more efficient brain connectivity, he said.
The study shows that emotional resilience is something that can be trained, and the evidence for that is seen in the documented changes in behavior and in the brain, Sanda Dolcos said.
“We are seeing that resilience is about flexibility,” she said. “The key to resilience is not avoiding negative emotions or just simply trying to feel positive all the time; it’s more about developing the flexibility to respond to emotions in ways that fit the situation.”
A follow-up analysis is more closely examining the impact of training on the participants’ written narratives of their distressing memories and the associated brain changes, the researchers said.
Journal
Scientific Reports
