Neural representation and clinically relevant moderators of individualised self-criticism in healthy subjects

Doerig, Nadja; Schlumpf, Yolanda; Spinelli, Simona; Späti, Jakub; Brakowski, Janis; Quednow, Boris B.; Seifritz, Erich; grosse Holtforth, Martin (2014). Neural representation and clinically relevant moderators of individualised self-criticism in healthy subjects. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 9(9), pp. 1333-1340. Oxford University Press 10.1093/scan/nst123

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Many people routinely criticise themselves. While self-criticism is largely unproblematic for most individuals, depressed patients exhibit excessive self-critical thinking, which leads to strong negative affects. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy subjects (N = 20) to investigate neural correlates and possible psychological moderators of self-critical processing. Stimuli consisted of individually selected adjectives of personally negative content and were contrasted with neutral and negative non-self-referential adjectives. We found that confrontation with self-critical material yielded neural activity in regions involved in emotions (anterior insula/hippocampus-amygdala formation) and in anterior and posterior cortical midline structures, which are associated with self-referential and autobiographical memory processing. Furthermore, contrasts revealed an extended network of bilateral frontal brain areas. We suggest that the co-activation of superior and inferior lateral frontal brain regions reflects the recruitment of a frontal top-down pathway, representing cognitive reappraisal strategies for dealing with evoked negative affects. In addition, activation of right superior frontal areas was positively associated with neuroticism and negatively associated with cognitive reappraisal. Although these findings may not be specific to negative stimuli, they support a role for clinically relevant personality traits in successful regulation of emotion during confrontation with self-critical material.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology > Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy
07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology

UniBE Contributor:

Grosse Holtforth, Martin

Subjects:

600 Technology > 610 Medicine & health
100 Philosophy > 150 Psychology

ISSN:

1749-5024

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

Language:

English

Submitter:

Adriana Biaggi

Date Deposited:

22 Apr 2015 11:15

Last Modified:

30 Mar 2023 16:19

Publisher DOI:

10.1093/scan/nst123

PubMed ID:

23887820

Uncontrolled Keywords:

functional magnetic resonance imaging, lateral frontal cortex, self-criticism, self-discrepancies

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.67372

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/67372

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