From Ars Technica · · 2m
Brain scans don't measure emotion control the same way
Three common methods for measuring emotional regulation capacity produce wildly different results, raising questions about how therapy effectiveness is assessed.
In brief
Three common methods for measuring emotional regulation capacity produce wildly different results, raising questions about how therapy effectiveness is assessed. Researchers found that questionnaires, brain imaging and task-based ratings of emotional regulation do not correlate with each other, suggesting current…
Nature publishes a rare negative result
The high-profile journal Nature published a study showing that methods used to measure emotional regulation do not measure the same thing, challenging how therapy effectiveness is assessed.
Cognitive reappraisal is central to therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is based on helping people reinterpret situations that cause negative emotions so they have less impact. This ability is linked to emotional resilience.
Three measurement methods compared
Researchers examined three widely used measures: trait questionnaires, task-based affective ratings following reappraisal, and amygdala down-regulation during reappraisal, using forty functional MRI data sets.
Brain activity effects are surprisingly small
The effect size was comparatively small. To detect this effect size with a statistical power of eighty percent, a single study would need to test one thousand one hundred five participants.
“To detect this effect size with a statistical power of 80 percent, a single study would need to test 1,105 participants”
The three measures don't correlate at all
Almost none of the variance in different measures correlated with each other. When one typical measure of emotional regulation varies, it rarely varies in a consistent way with the others.
Brain activity shows unexpected patterns
When people reappraised emotions, decision-making brain areas did not activate as expected. Instead, amygdala activity correlated with decision-making areas: high emotion meant high reasoning activity too.
The three methods measure different things
Questionnaires ask about long-term personality tendencies. Task-based ratings and fMRI capture in-the-moment responses but under very different experimental circumstances, including being inside an MRI tube.
Current tools cannot capture the process
Emotional reappraisal may be real, but current tools cannot clearly capture the process effectively. Researchers caution that strong claims about emotion regulation capacity based on any specific brain region should be made with considerable caution.
“strong claims about a person's emotion regulation capacity based on any specific brain region should be made with considerable caution”
What to remember
Researchers found that questionnaires, brain imaging and task-based ratings of emotional regulation do not correlate with each other, suggesting current measurement tools are fundamentally flawed.
