RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Training the Emotional Brain: Improving Affective Control through Emotional Working Memory Training
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 5301
OP 5311
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2593-12.2013
VO 33
IS 12
A1 Susanne Schweizer
A1 Jessica Grahn
A1 Adam Hampshire
A1 Dean Mobbs
A1 Tim Dalgleish
YR 2013
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/12/5301.abstract
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.