Linking Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation to Neural Engagement in Fear Predictions and Face Processing

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ali Arain¹, Elizabeth A. Bauer¹, Paige Broski¹, Hamza Suhail¹, John Leri¹, Luna Malloy¹, Kierra Morris¹, Josh Cisler¹; ¹University of Texas Dell Medical School

We investigated how individual differences in emotion regulation skill moderated neurocircuitry engagement during an emotional face-processing task. We predicted that worse emotion regulation skills would be associated with greater neurocircuitry engagement during emotional face processing. Adult participants (N =134) completed an emotional face processing task during fMRI, which presented facial stimuli that varied in valence (fearful, neutral) and duration (overt/500 ms, covert/33 ms). A support vector machine (SVM) was used to calculate individualized fear predictions (IFP) by building a classifier to distinguish fearful faces from neutral faces using leave-one-out cross-validation. We selected four networks to build the classifiers: bilateral amygdala, salience network, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and ventral visual network. Linear mixed-effects models were used to assess the interactions between total difficulty in emotional regulation scale (DERS) scores, valence, and stimulus duration on IFP. Greater difficulties in emotion regulation were associated with reduced face predictions by the SVM classifier in the salience network (p<0.05). In the mPFC network, a three-way interaction between valence, duration, and DERS score demonstrated that better emotion regulation was associated with greater face processing for overt neutral faces (p<0.05). Furthermore, an interaction between valence and DERS score demonstrated that when looking at fearful faces, better emotion regulation was associated with increased IFP in the mPFC (p<0.05). These findings indicate that worse emotion regulation is associated with altered neural responses, particularly diminished neural engagement in the salience and mPFC networks. These results also suggest that alternative networks may contribute to emotion regulation and facial processing.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotional responding