In today's world, keeping healthy is not easy. On one hand, the challenges and uncertainties of our daily lives can take a toll, generating stress and susceptibilities to anxiety and depression that in turn contribute to chronic bodily ailments ranging from heart disease to diabetes. On the other hand, we are faced with opportunities for immediate gratification through eating tasty but unhealthy food, or consuming alcohol, cigarettes or controlled substances. Whether one acts in these ways as an antidote to feeling bad, or because they are pleasurable in their own right, a short-term gain can become a long-term pain when over time weight control, substance abuse or other related health problems develop. What can be done to change these unhealthy behaviors? To address this question, this application takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines the theories and methods of social, cognitive and affective neuroscience with the theories and methods of social and developmental psychology. The over-arching goal is to understand the development of the neural mechanisms that enable us to regulate the appetitive pull of potentially unhealthy substances (e.g. fattening foods or drugs) and the aversive push of unpleasant emotions that might motivate one to seek these substances in the first place. Our focus is on the development of these mechanisms from late childhood through adolescence - time periods critical for the development of these self-regulatory abilities and the maturation of the prefrontal-subcortical interactions underlying them. Our premise is that unless we understand the boundary conditions and underlying mechanisms for normal development of emotion regulatory abilities, it will not be possible to tailor future interventions appropriately - particularly for the age ranges and individuals for whom it could make the biggest difference. Towards this end, our application has two specific aims:
Aim 1 - To chart the developmental trajectory of emotion regulatory mechanisms that support behavior change through childhood and adolescence;
and Aim 2 - To relate the behavioral, physiological and neural measures collected under Aim 1 to measures of health and health behaviors, including BMI and substance use. To achieve these aims we will bridge two largely separate research literatures. The first uses an ecologically valid delay of gratification task for which childhood performance predicts adult health outcomes like BMI and substance use. The second uses brain imaging to identify the neural bases of the attentional control and reappraisal strategies used to delay gratification and regulate affective impulses more generally. Combining these methods with assessments of disordered eating, BMI, and substance use will allow us to test novel hypotheses about the basic mechanisms of behavior change, including how it may depend on a core set of prefrontal-subcortical interactions that mature during adolescence, and how patterns of individual and developmental variation in subcortically-driven affective reactivity and prefrontal control abilities may indicate which individuals are at greatest risk for maladaptive health behaviors.

Public Health Relevance

There is growing evidence that childhood and adolescence are critical times for development of the emotion regulatory abilities needed to adaptively balance affective impulses and the deleterious health behaviors they can promote. Using a combination of behavioral and functional imaging methods, this application aims to chart the development of the emotion regulatory mechanisms that enable us to rein in affective impulses and to relate these mechanisms to measures of the maladaptive health behaviors they can promote. The ultimate goal is to specify which individuals are at greatest risk for maladaptive health behaviors, at what age this risk is greatest, and which self-regulatory mechanisms could be targeted in future interventions (e.g. CBT) during particular points in the developmental course.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01HD069178-03
Application #
8306717
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-BBBP-R (50))
Program Officer
Haverkos, Lynne
Project Start
2010-09-28
Project End
2015-07-31
Budget Start
2012-08-01
Budget End
2013-07-31
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2012
Total Cost
$539,801
Indirect Cost
$157,966
Name
Columbia University (N.Y.)
Department
Psychology
Type
Other Domestic Higher Education
DUNS #
049179401
City
New York
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
10027
Helion, Chelsea; Ochsner, Kevin N (2018) The role of emotion regulation in moral judgment. Neuroethics 11:297-308
Silvers, Jennifer A; Insel, Catherine; Powers, Alisa et al. (2017) The transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by a general decrease in amygdala reactivity and an affect-specific ventral-to-dorsal shift in medial prefrontal recruitment. Dev Cogn Neurosci 25:128-137
Braunstein, Laura Martin; Gross, James J; Ochsner, Kevin N (2017) Explicit and implicit emotion regulation: a multi-level framework. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 12:1545-1557
Silvers, Jennifer A; Insel, Catherine; Powers, Alisa et al. (2017) vlPFC-vmPFC-Amygdala Interactions Underlie Age-Related Differences in Cognitive Regulation of Emotion. Cereb Cortex 27:3502-3514
Satpute, Ajay B; Nook, Erik C; Narayanan, Sandhya et al. (2016) Emotions in ""Black and White"" or Shades of Gray? How We Think About Emotion Shapes Our Perception and Neural Representation of Emotion. Psychol Sci 27:1428-1442
Gilead, Michael; Boccagno, Chelsea; Silverman, Melanie et al. (2016) Self-regulation via neural simulation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113:10037-42
Martin, Rebecca E; Ochsner, Kevin N (2016) The Neuroscience of Emotion Regulation Development: Implications for Education. Curr Opin Behav Sci 10:142-148
Silvers, Jennifer A; Hubbard, Alexa D; Biggs, Emily et al. (2016) Affective lability and difficulties with regulation are differentially associated with amygdala and prefrontal response in women with Borderline Personality Disorder. Psychiatry Res Neuroimaging 254:74-82
Silvers, Jennifer A; Hubbard, Alexa D; Chaudhury, Sadia et al. (2016) Suicide attempters with Borderline Personality Disorder show differential orbitofrontal and parietal recruitment when reflecting on aversive memories. J Psychiatr Res 81:71-8
Reeck, Crystal; Ames, Daniel R; Ochsner, Kevin N (2016) The Social Regulation of Emotion: An Integrative, Cross-Disciplinary Model. Trends Cogn Sci 20:47-63

Showing the most recent 10 out of 20 publications