Emotion Regulation Deficits Across Different Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Searching for a Regulatory Network

Emotion regulation (ER) impairment is a major dysfunction involved in various psychiatric disorders and is thought to play a key role in development, maintenance and treatment of psychopathology. To date, several studies have systematically and meta-analytically reviewed the neural basis of ER in healthy subjects and clinical populations. However, no study has yet integrated the common or distinct neural underpinnings of emotion dysregulation across a variety of disorders. Therefore, the aim of the present meta-analysis was to specify the brain network which is shared in disorders with ER deficits. Method We performed a comprehensive neuroimaging meta-analysis of volitional ER tasks in populations of patients with various psychiatric disorders. In these studies, participants were instructed to intentionally alter their emotional responses to affective stimuli by applying specific strategies like cognitive reappraisal or response suppression.Based on the PRISMA guideline, we screened neuroimaging papers in the PubMed database and retrieved 28 eligible studies. Then, we extracted the reported stereotactic data and used the activation likelihood analysis method to test for convergence of deviant neural activation in psychiatric patients contrasting to healthy controls. Results A set of meta-analyses have been performed focused on the brain activation (attending condition vs. regulating condition). Surprisingly, no significant result has been detected between the patient groups and healthy controls. ConclusionsWe conclude that the lack of ER-related regional convergence in psychiatric patients might be related to the heterogeneous clinical population. Such great heterogeneity highlights the need for further investigation on the ER difficulties in each patient group to provide enough evidence to confirm a pattern of dysfunctional brain activation during ER as a transdiagnostic feature of these disorders.