title: Soothing the threatened brain: leveraging contact comfort with emotionally focused therapy.
abstract: Social relationships are tightly linked to health and well-being. Recent work suggests that social relationships can even serve vital emotion regulation functions by minimizing threat-related neural activity. But relationship distress remains a significant public health problem in North America and elsewhere. A promising approach to helping couples both resolve relationship distress and nurture effective interpersonal functioning is Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples (EFT), a manualized, empirically supported therapy that is strongly focused on repairing adult attachment bonds. We sought to examine a neural index of social emotion regulation as a potential mediator of the effects of EFT. Specifically, we examined the effectiveness of EFT for modifying the social regulation of neural threat responding using an fMRI-based handholding procedure. Results suggest that EFT altered the brain's representation of threat cues in the presence of a romantic partner. EFT-related changes during stranger handholding were also observed, but stranger effects were dependent upon self-reported relationship quality. EFT also appeared to increase threat-related brain activity in regions associated with self-regulation during the no-handholding condition. These findings provide a critical window into the regulatory mechanisms of close relationships in general and EFT in particular.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario; International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy, Ottawa, Ontario,  Canada.
authors.forename: Susan M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.forename: Melissa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Burgess Moser
authors.forename: Lane
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Beckes
authors.forename: Andra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Tracy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dalgleish
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Halchuk
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hasselmo
authors.forename: Paul S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Greenman
authors.forename: Zul
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Merali
authors.forename: James A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Coan
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D019546:Couples Therapy; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005195:Family Relations; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging