Cognitive reappraisal is a form of emotion regulation requiring the reinterpretation of emotional stimuli. Cognitive flexibility and attentional control may support emotion regulation, but little is known about behavioral associations and neural overlap between regions associated with reappraisal, cognitive flexibility and attentional control. Due to its cognitive nature, we expect individual differences in cognitive flexibility to be related to reappraisal to a greater degree than attentional control.
Here, we tested this in a sample of N = 103 healthy young participants using fMRI. All participants performed an emotion-regulation paradigm with pictures, comparing ‘watch’ vs. ‘regulate’ trials, as well as a cued task-switching paradigm (i.e., cognitive flexibility) and a Flanker task with word stimuli (i.e., attentional control). Behaviorally, there was no robust association between reappraisal success as measured by reductions in arousal ratings and either task-switch costs or congruency effects in the Flanker task. The fMRI data revealed a selective association of attentional control with emotion regulation. Individuals with higher behavioral congruency effects (lower attentional control) engaged frontoparietal regions to a higher degree during reappraisal, presumably to compensate for greater distractibility. At the same time, individuals with higher inferior frontal activity in the Flanker task also showed greater frontoparietal activity during reappraisal. No such association was present for task switching.
These findings indicate that attentional control mechanisms are involved in down-regulating negative emotions via cognitive strategies but do not provide evidence for the expected association with cognitive flexibility. Future studies might directly compare these associations between different emotion-regulation strategies.