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. 2023 Sep 7;18(1):nsad043.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsad043.

Emotion regulation of social pain: double dissociation of lateral prefrontal cortices supporting reappraisal and distraction

Licheng Mo  1 , Sijin Li  1 , Si Cheng  1 , Yiwei Li  1 , Feng Xu  2 , Dandan Zhang  3   4   5
Affiliations

Emotion regulation of social pain: double dissociation of lateral prefrontal cortices supporting reappraisal and distraction

Licheng Mo et al. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. .

Abstract

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) are both crucial regions involved in voluntary emotion regulation. However, it remains unclear whether the two regions show functional specificity for reappraisal and distraction. This study employed transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to explore, in a real social interactive scenario, whether different lateral prefrontal regions play relatively specific roles in downregulating social pain via reappraisal and distraction. Participants initially took part in a social interactive game, followed by receiving either active (the DLPFC- or VLPFC-activated group, n = 100 per group) or control (the vertex-activated group, n = 100) TMS session. They were then instructed to use both distraction and reappraisal strategies to downregulate any negative emotions evoked by the social evaluation given by their peers who interacted with them previously. Results demonstrated that the TMS-activated DLPFC has a greater beneficial effect during distraction, whereas the activated VLPFC has a greater beneficial effect during reappraisal. This result investigated the direct experience of social pain and extended previous findings on empathy-related responses to affective pictures while also controlling for confounding factors such as empathic concern. Therefore, we are now confident in the double dissociation proposal of the DLPFC and VLPFC in distraction and reappraisal.

Keywords: distraction; dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; emotion regulation; reappraisal; social pain; ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declared that they had no conflict of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Illustrations of experimental methods. (A) A flow chart of the task procedure. (B) One trial of the main task. (C) One trial of the post-task rating. (D) A picture of the Werewolf game. Due to copyright, the people in the images presented here are all replaced by the graduate students from the research group. All the persons in these pictures gave their consent for the materials to appear in academic journals.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Subjective ratings of negative emotions. A 1-to-9-point scale was used, with higher scores indicating more positive feelings toward the social evaluation (1 for the most negative and 9 for the most positive). Bars represent the SEM. ***P < 0.001. The TMS-simulated electric fields are illustrated on top of the plot (SimNIBS, www.simnibs.org, Thielscher et al., 2015).
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Post-task ratings of negative emotions. A 1-to-9-point scale was used, with higher scores indicating more negative feelings toward the social exclusion pictures (1 for the least negative and 9 for the most negative). Bars represent the SEM. **P < 0.010.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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