Executive functions and the down-regulation and up-regulation of emotion

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between individual differences in executive functions (EF; assessed by measures of working memory, Stroop, trail making, and verbal fluency) and ability to down-regulate and up-regulate responses to emotionally evocative film clips. To ensure a wide range of EF, 48 participants with diverse neurodegenerative disorders and 21 older neurologically normal ageing participants were included. Participants were exposed to three different movie clips that were designed to elicit a mix of disgust and amusement. While watching the films they were either instructed to watch, down-regulate, and up-regulate their visible emotional responses. Heart rate and facial behaviours were monitored throughout. Emotion regulatory ability was operationalised as changes in heart rate and facial behaviour in the down- and up-regulation conditions, controlling for responses in the watch condition. Results indicated that higher verbal fluency scores were related to greater ability to regulate emotion in both the down-regulation and up-regulation conditions. This finding remained significant even after controlling for age and general cognitive functioning. No relationships were found between emotion regulation and the other EF measures. We believe these results derive from differences among EF measures, with verbal-fluency performance best capturing the complex sequence of controlled planning, activation, and monitoring required for successful emotion regulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of emotion–cognition interaction, suggesting a link between emotion-regulatory abilities and individual differences in complex executive functions.

Keywords:

• Emotion regulation
• Executive functions
• Emotional behaviour
• Stroop
• Trail making
• Verbal fluency
• Working memory
• FTLD
• AD
• Cognitive influences on emotion

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging AG019724-050003; AG017766-01A1; and National Institute of Mental Health MH020006-01 awarded to RWL, and the National Institute on Aging grant AG019724-01A1 and the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center of California awarded to BLM and grant from the National Institute on Aging AG022983-03 awarded to JHK.

We would like to thank Adam Nemet for his help with data management, the members of the Berkeley Psychophysiology Laboratory for their help in data collection, and the Memory and Aging Center for their help in conducting this research.

Notes

¹There are numerous ways to calculate interference (Jensen & Rohwer, 1966). We chose residualised scores over other methods because this resulted in a distribution that best approximated normality.

²We reanalysed our results after controlling for diagnostic group membership (dummy coded) and executive function measures. These results showed that the relationship between fluency composite and up-regulation composite was reduced from r(65)=.39 to r(65)=.27, but remained significant (p=.02). Using similar controls, the relationship between fluency composite and down-regulation composite was reduced from r(65) = − .26 to r(65) = − .22, dropping to marginal significance (p=.06). With these controls, null findings between emotion regulation and other executive function measures remained unchanged.

²We reanalysed our results after controlling for diagnostic group membership (dummy coded) and executive function measures. These results showed that the relationship between fluency composite and up-regulation composite was reduced from r(65)=.39 to r(65)=.27, but remained significant (p=.02). Using similar controls, the relationship between fluency composite and down-regulation composite was reduced from r(65) = − .26 to r(65) = − .22, dropping to marginal significance (p=.06). With these controls, null findings between emotion regulation and other executive function measures remained unchanged.