Magnetoencephalographic Correlates of Emotion Regulation: Topography and Classification

The most common strategies of emotion regulation are reappraisal and suppression. However, it is still unclear which neural mechanisms underlie them, since a number of studies have identified different patterns of brain activation. In the present study, for the first time, the inter-subject correlation was calculated based on the neural activity captured by magnetoencephalography during free watching of neutral and negative videos, reappraisal and suppression. We also examined sources of activation and attempted to predict the conditions using a neural network. We revealed a greater average inter-subject correlation (a marker of engagement in naturalistic stimuli) regarding watching negative videos in comparison to other conditions, which points to individual differences in emotional processes. Inter-subject correlation of the source activity was higher in the prefrontal cortex during both regulation strategies compared to natural watching of negative videos, which supports the assumption of the involvement of this region in regulation. We were not able to predict the condition of watching by the network, but found that it has a potential to learn and, supposedly, requires more samples in a training dataset. In sum, the inter-subject correlation measures based on magnetoencephalography demonstrated different synchrony of neural activation regarding aspects of emotion regulation, which is worthwhile to investigate in further studies with other naturalistic stimuli.