The Role Of Right VLPFC In Emotion Regulation Of Social Exclusion

Social exclusion is a typical negative social experience,individuals will experience short-term social exclusion will produce negative emotional experience and injury feelings,this kind of social pain will cause a psychological response similar to physical pain.Prolonged experience of social exclusion lowers the self-esteem of the excluded and poses a serious threat to basic human needs,such as the need for belonging and the need for control.The purpose of this study was to investigate the causal relationship between social rejection and negative emotion regulation in individuals with different levels of depression tendency after being stimulated by r VLPFC(right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex).It provides more scientific basis for refining the target brain regions in the treatment of patients with social dysfunction,including social anxiety,autism spectrum disorder and depression.Previous studies on t DCS(transcranial direct current stimulation)have shown that r VLPFC is an important brain area for social and emotional regulation.Activating r VLPFC can significantly reduce the intensity of social negative emotional experience.However,in the context of social exclusion,the causal relationship between r VLPFC function and explicit emotion regulation is not clear.The experiment 1 used t DCS to activate r VLPFC,and asked participants to use emotion regulation strategies to re-evaluate social exclusion images.The results showed that compared with pseudo stimulation,the negative emotion score produced by t DCS stimulation on r VLPFC was lower,and the pupil diameter produced by cognitive reevaluation was significantly smaller than that of passive viewing.t DCS also led to longer gaze times for excluded subjects and shorter fixation times for excluded subjects.This suggests that r VLPFC plays a causal role in the reduction of negative emotions caused by social exclusion.However,the two cognitive reassessment strategies given in the first experiment introduce multiple persona variables(first person or third party identity),so it is impossible to determine whether the effectiveness of cognitive reassessment is caused by personal change or t DCS stimulation,so we can not rule out the interference of the reassessment strategy,so we adjust the instructions in experiment 2 to eliminate the interference of the reassessment strategy to further verify the effectiveness of the first experiment.Impairment of social function is one of the important characteristics of patients with depression or people with depressive tendencies.This group is highly sensitive to social exclusion and has a lower ability to regulate the negative social emotional experience.In experiment 3,we used the explicit emotion regulation task to study the changes of emotion regulation ability of subjects with high and low depression levels after receiving positive t DCS for r VLPFC.The results showed that although activating r VLPFC with t DCS could help subjects weaken negative emotional experience through emotional regulation,the decrease of negative emotional intensity in subjects with high depression level was significantly lower than that in subjects with low depression level.In addition,it was also found that the t DCS effect was stronger on the negative emotions(that is,social exclusion)originated from the society than the negative emotions derived from the individual.This study is the first attempt to improve the ability of social emotion regulation of depressed people by electrical stimulation.The results showed that the r VLPFC of adults with high depression level was only activated by t DCS for a single and short period of time(34 min),but their mood regulation ability was not significantly improved.This suggests that t DCS should be applied many times to the intervention or treatment of depression-prone groups or patients with depression.In summary,it is found that t DCS nerve activation for r VLPFC can improve the ability of subjects to regulate negative emotions derived from social events,but this t DCS effect exists only in subjects with low levels of depression,while the improvement of emotion regulation ability of subjects with high levels of depression is not obvious.The results of this study also show that the activation of r VLPFC brain region by t DCS has a certain specificity in improving the ability of social emotion regulation,that is,the emotional improvement of the subjects in the situation of social exclusion is more obvious than that in the negative non-social situation.Our findings provide valuable experimental evidence for further revealing the emotion regulation function of r VLPFC and the treatment of depression based on this target.