Ignore the faces: Neural characterisation of emotional inhibition from childhood to adulthood using MEG

• Main Authors: Anagnostou, E. (Author), Hunt, B.A.E (Author), Pang, E.W (Author), Safar, K. (Author), Sato, J. (Author), Taylor, M.J (Author), Urbain, C.M (Author), Vandewouw, M.M (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley and Sons Inc 2021
• Subjects: adolescent; Adolescent; adult; Adult; adulthood; angular gyrus; article; attention; automatic emotion regulation; brain cortex; brain region; Cerebral Cortex; child; Child; Child, Preschool; childhood; cohort analysis; controlled study; development; emotion regulation; emotional go/no-go; Emotional Regulation; executive function; Executive Function; facial expression; Facial Expression; facial recognition; Facial Recognition; female; Female; Go No Go task; human; human development; Human Development; human experiment; Humans; inferior frontal gyrus; Inhibition, Psychological; magnetoencephalography; Magnetoencephalography; major clinical study; male; Male; orbital cortex; physiology; preschool child; psychomotor performance; Psychomotor Performance; young adult; Young Adult
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 The ability to effectively and automatically regulate one's response to emotional information is a basic, fundamental skill for social functioning. The neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation processing have been assessed, however few investigations have leveraged neurophysiological techniques, particularly magnetoencephalography (MEG) to determine the development of this critical ability. The current MEG study is the first to examine developmental changes in the neural mechanisms supporting automatic emotion regulation. We used an emotional go/no-go task with happy and angry faces in a single-site cohort of 97 healthy participants, 4–40 years of age. We found age-related changes as a function of emotion and condition in brain regions key to emotion regulation, including the right inferior frontal gyrus, orbitofrontal cortices and primarily right-lateralized temporal areas. Interaction effects, including an age by emotion and condition, were also found in the left angular gyrus, an area critical in emotion regulation and attention. Findings demonstrate protracted and nonlinear development, due to the adolescent group, of emotion regulation processing from child to adulthood, and highlight that age-related differences in emotion regulation are modulated by emotional face type. © 2021 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.