Frontal tDCS and Emotional Reactivity to Negative Content: Examining the Roles of Biased Interpretation and Emotion Regu
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Frontal tDCS and Emotional Reactivity to Negative Content: Examining the Roles of Biased Interpretation and Emotion Regulation Patrick J. F. Clarke1 · Sumitra M. P. Haridas1 · Bram Van Bockstaele2,4 · Nigel T. M. Chen1 · Elske Salemink2,3 · Lies Notebaert4 Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Background Given findings showing that emotion regulation may be enhanced through prefrontal neurostimulation, the present study examined whether the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation on emotional reactivity is mediated via biased interpretation, and whether emotion regulation goals further moderate this relationship. Methods Healthy participants (n = 79) were allocated to one of four conditions to receive either active or sham tDCS concurrently with an emotion regulation task during which they were instructed to maintain or down-regulate their emotional reactions (between groups). A homograph priming task assessed biased interpretation, and emotional reactivity was assessed in response to a negative video viewing task. Results Those receiving active tDCS showed smaller elevations in negative mood in response to viewing negative videos compared to sham stimulation. Neither tDCS condition nor emotion regulation condition had an impact on interpretive bias, and there was no evidence for tDCS-enhancement of emotion regulation. As such, interpretive bias did not significantly mediate the relationship between tDCS and emotional reactivity, and no moderating role of emotion regulation was observed. Conclusions The present results are consistent with neural models implicating increased frontal activity with reduction in emotional reactivity, but provides no support for the role of interpretive bias in this relationship, and no evidence that tDCS enhanced the effects of emotion regulation. Keywords Emotion reactivity · Emotion regulation · Interpretation bias · Neurostimulation · tDCS
Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10162-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Patrick J. F. Clarke [email protected] 1
School of Psychology, Curtin University, Kent St, Bentley, WA 6102, Australia
2
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3
Department of Clinical Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
4
School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
A considerable body of literature has sought to describe the neural architecture that underpins the cognitive and emotional regulatory processes operating in anxiety and depression. In particular, neural models of emotional disorders have highlighted that anxious and depressed populations tend to show hypoactive neural activity in lateral prefrontal areas (Etkin and Wager 2007; Siegle et al. 2007) which are commonly associated with the top-down regulation of emoti
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