PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Silvia U. Maier
AU  - Todd A. Hare
TI  - Greater BOLD signal during successful emotional stimulus reappraisal is associated with better dietary self-control
AID  - 10.1101/542712
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 542712
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/02/07/542712.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/02/07/542712.full
AB  - We combined established emotion regulation and dietary choice tasks with fMRI to investigate behavioral and neural associations in self-regulation across the two domains in human participants. We found that increased BOLD activity during the successful reappraisal of positive and negative emotional stimuli was associated with better dietary self-control. This cross-task correlation was present in medial and lateral prefrontal cortex as well as the striatum. These results suggest that neural processes related to the reappraisal of emotional stimuli may also facilitate dietary self-control. However, within the dietary self-control task itself, we did not find that prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity significantly increased with self-control success during our food choice task, in contrast to previous reports. This prompted us to conduct exploratory analyses, which revealed that BOLD activity in PFC tracks the amount of taste and healthiness at stake on each self-control challenge trial regardless of the chosen outcome. This exploratory finding also replicated in an independent dataset. We discuss the implications of this evidence that individuals track the self-control stakes in light of theories about effortful self-regulation. In addition, we discuss features of this version of the food choice task that may have reduced the need to recruit PFC to achieve self-control. In summary, our findings indicate that the neural systems supporting emotion reappraisal can generalize to other behavioral contexts that require reevaluation to conform to the current goal.Significance statement Reappraisal is a prominent strategy for self-regulation. Yet data to compare processes underlying the reappraisal of emotions and dietary self-control within the same individual is lacking. Here, we use two established emotion regulation and dietary choice tasks to compare both on the neural level. We found that increased BOLD activity in several brain regions including medial and lateral prefrontal cortex and striatum during the successful reappraisal of positive and negative emotional stimuli was linked to better dietary self-control. These results suggest that neural processes underlying the reappraisal of emotional stimuli may also facilitate dietary self-control.