PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Susanne Schweizer
AU  - Jessica Grahn
AU  - Adam Hampshire
AU  - Dean Mobbs
AU  - Tim Dalgleish
TI  - Training the Emotional Brain: Improving Affective Control through Emotional Working Memory Training
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2593-12.2013
DP  - 2013 Mar 20
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 5301--5311
VI  - 33
IP  - 12
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/12/5301.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/12/5301.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2013 Mar 20; 33
AB  - Affective cognitive control capacity (e.g., the ability to regulate emotions or manipulate emotional material in the service of task goals) is associated with professional and interpersonal success. Impoverished affective control, by contrast, characterizes many neuropsychiatric disorders. Insights from neuroscience indicate that affective cognitive control relies on the same frontoparietal neural circuitry as working memory (WM) tasks, which suggests that systematic WM training, performed in an emotional context, has the potential to augment affective control. Here we show, using behavioral and fMRI measures, that 20 d of training on a novel emotional WM protocol successfully enhanced the efficiency of this frontoparietal demand network. Critically, compared with placebo training, emotional WM training also accrued transfer benefits to a “gold standard” measure of affective cognitive control–emotion regulation. These emotion regulation gains were associated with greater activity in the targeted frontoparietal demand network along with other brain regions implicated in affective control, notably the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. The results have important implications for the utility of WM training in clinical, prevention, and occupational settings.