What is it about?
Emotion regulation using a reappraisal strategy reduces amygdala activation in emotional situations. Patients with bipolar disorder and those at risk to develop it (first-degree relatives) were not able to regulate emotions and amygdala activity using this strategy.
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Why is it important?
Because not only patients, but also healthy people at risk for developing the disorder, show the impairment, emotion regulation deficits are a vulnerability marker for bipolar disorder. Training emotion regulation may, thus, reduce the chances to become sick. In the long run, it may even be used in early diagnostics.
Perspectives
This study was incredibly effortful to do (Thanks to all the co-authors!), but is absolutely worth it. Adaptively managing our own emotions seems to be a critical faculty for a happy and successful life and the study elucidates the mechanisms underyling impairments, which will in the long run benefit more effective interventions.
Philipp Kanske
Technische Universitat Dresden
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Impaired regulation of emotion: neural correlates of reappraisal and distraction in bipolar disorder and unaffected relatives, Translational Psychiatry, January 2015, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/tp.2014.137.
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