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

Text 1333.full.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (331kB)

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.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

0 since deposited on 22 Apr 2015
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item