title: Training the emotional brain: improving affective control through emotional working memory training.
abstract: Affective cognitive control capacity (e.g., the ability to regulate emotions or manipulate emotional material in the service of task goals) is associated with professional and interpersonal success. Impoverished affective control, by contrast, characterizes many neuropsychiatric disorders. Insights from neuroscience indicate that affective cognitive control relies on the same frontoparietal neural circuitry as working memory (WM) tasks, which suggests that systematic WM training, performed in an emotional context, has the potential to augment affective control. Here we show, using behavioral and fMRI measures, that 20 d of training on a novel emotional WM protocol successfully enhanced the efficiency of this frontoparietal demand network. Critically, compared with placebo training, emotional WM training also accrued transfer benefits to a "gold standard" measure of affective cognitive control-emotion regulation. These emotion regulation gains were associated with greater activity in the targeted frontoparietal demand network along with other brain regions implicated in affective control, notably the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. The results have important implications for the utility of WM training in clinical, prevention, and occupational settings.
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, CB2 7EF, United Kingdom. susanne.schweizer@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
authors.forename: Susanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schweizer
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grahn
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hampshire
authors.forename: Dean
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mobbs
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dalgleish
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D015928:Cognitive Behavioral Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction / Q000379:methods*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D006179:Gyrus Cinguli / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D010919:Placebos; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D010919:Placebos