When healthy participants are instructed to amplify (up-regulate) their positive emotional responses to images in the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, the ventral striatum (VS) is consistently recruited — but a combined fMRI plus experience-sampling study (Grosse Rueschkamp, Brose, Villringer and Gaebler, 2019) showed that this VS activity is engaged even when up-regulating neutral images that produce no measurable affective change, and that VS activation during instructed up-regulation did not predict self-reported regulation success in participants' daily lives. Two linked questions remain open: (1) whether VS activity during up-regulation encodes the pursuit of a regulation goal (a valence-general signal) or the magnitude of generated positive affect; and (2) which experimental designs and neural measures of positive-emotion up-regulation, if any, translate to spontaneous emotion regulation and affective functioning outside the laboratory. The available evidence does not settle either question.

Background

Emotion regulation denotes the processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how strongly they experience or express them; a common laboratory operationalization is cognitive reappraisal, in which participants are instructed to reinterpret an emotional stimulus so as to increase (up-regulate) or decrease (down-regulate) their emotional response. Most neuroimaging work has concerned the down-regulation of negative emotion; the up-regulation of positive emotion is far less characterized. The ventral striatum (VS), a dopamine-rich basal-ganglia region, is a key hub of the brain's reward circuitry and is reliably engaged by positive affective processing and reward anticipation. A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of emotion regulation (Morawetz, Bode, Derntl and Heekeren, 2017) found greater VS activity during up-regulation than down-regulation for both positive and negative emotions, suggesting — but not establishing — that VS recruitment may track the pursuit of a regulatory goal rather than positive feelings per se. Laboratory-to-life translation is studied by pairing scanner measures with the experience sampling method (ESM, also called ecological momentary assessment), in which participants report momentary affect and regulation behavior several times per day on a smartphone over one or more weeks; prior work (e.g., Heller, Fox, Wing, McQuisition, Vack and Davidson, 2015) showed that temporal dynamics of affect-related neural activity in the laboratory predict the persistence of real-world emotional responses — there, sustained ventral-striatum engagement during reward processing in the laboratory positively predicted the duration of real-world positive emotional responses. Grosse Rueschkamp, Brose, Villringer and Gaebler (2019) combined fMRI and 10 days of ESM in 63 healthy young adults: participants up-regulated responses to positive and neutral images (or passively viewed them), and trial-wise affective valence ratings, VS activation, and daily affect/regulation reports were analyzed. VS activation increased during up-regulation of both positive and neutral images, tracked between- and within-person differences in valence for positive images, yet did not significantly predict daily-life up-regulation success; exploratory whole-brain analyses — in which the parametric coupling between affect change and brain activity was computed across all task conditions, irrespective of instruction or stimulus valence — showed that participants with lower mean daily affect had stronger coupling between momentary affect change and activation in medial frontal and subcortical regions including the VS. The authors interpreted the last finding speculatively via reward-expectation and prediction-error (the signed difference between obtained and expected reward used in reinforcement-learning accounts of mood) dynamics. These findings define the unresolved questions addressed here: the functional interpretation of VS engagement during up-regulation and the ecological validity of laboratory neural markers of instructed positive-emotion regulation. The two share one scientific objective: a neurobehavioral account of positive-emotion up-regulation that holds across laboratory and everyday contexts. The exploratory low-daily-affect moderation finding and its speculative reward-expectation/prediction-error interpretation, which the source did not frame as an open question calling for a mechanistic test, remain background context here.

Problem Statement

Determine the functional significance and ecological validity of neural activation during the up-regulation of positive emotion, as raised by Grosse Rueschkamp, Brose, Villringer and Gaebler (2019). Specifically: (1) establish whether ventral striatum activation during instructed up-regulation reflects the pursuit of an up-regulation goal (a valence-general regulatory signal, engaged even when affect does not change, as observed for neutral images) or the encoding of the magnitude of generated positive affect; and (2) establish whether, and through which experimental designs and neural measures, laboratory neural markers of instructed positive-emotion up-regulation generalize to spontaneous emotion regulation and affective functioning in daily life, a requirement with three independently required parts: (2a) whether such markers generalize; (2b) through which experimental designs and neural measures they do, including whether designs with spontaneous regulation in the scanner or matched strategies across laboratory and daily-life contexts yield markers that predict everyday regulation success; and (2c) why VS activation under brief, instructed, stimulus-driven conditions failed to predict daily-life up-regulation success. These two questions jointly support one objective: a neurobehavioral account of positive-emotion up-regulation that holds across laboratory and everyday contexts, together with an account of the methodological conditions (time scale, strategy instruction, stimulus representativeness) under which scanner-measured regulation relates to real-world affect.

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