The role of arousal in the spontaneous regulation of emotions in healthy aging: a fMRI investigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite ample support for enhanced affective well-being and emotional stability in healthy aging, the role of potentially important dimensions, such as the emotional arousal, has not been systematically investigated in neuroimaging studies. In addition, the few behavioral studies that examined effects of arousal have produced inconsistent findings. The present study manipulated the arousal of pictorial stimuli to test the hypothesis that preserved emotional functioning in aging is modulated by the level of arousal, and to identify the associated neural correlates. Young and older healthy participants were presented with negative and neutral pictures, which they rated for emotional content, while fMRI data were recorded. There were three main novel findings regarding the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of negative pictures with different levels of arousal in young and older adults. First, the common engagement of the right amygdala in young and older adults was driven by high arousing negative stimuli. Second, complementing an age-related reduction in the subjective ratings for low arousing negative pictures, there were opposing patterns of activity in the rostral/ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the amygdala, which showed increased vs. decreased responses, respectively, to low arousing negative pictures. Third, increased spontaneous activity in the ventral ACC/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in older adults was linked to reduced ratings for low arousing negative pictures. Overall, these findings advance our understanding of the neural correlates underlying processing of negative emotions with different levels of arousal in the context of enhanced emotional functioning in healthy aging. Notably, the results support the idea that older adults have emotion regulation networks chronically activated, in the absence of explicit induction of the goal to regulate emotions, and that this effect is specific to low arousing negative emotions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".