Brain Connectivity in Emotional Regulation: The Emotional Solving Problems

Emotional solving problems is an emotional regulation mechanism that implements cognitive-linguistics strategies to reduce the affective impact in a situation and to accomplish a proposed objective. Together with the reappraisal, it is considered a healthy mechanism, in difference with suppression and rumination. Researches that have used neuroimaging techniques have proposed cerebral areas associated to the functioning of the different emotional regulation mechanisms. The objective of this research was to study the brain connectivity gradients of white matter associated to emotional solving problems, to propose a brain connectivity network of this emotional regulation mechanism. The efficacy of emotional solving problems was measured with a behavioral task recently developed, based on semantic effortful retrieval with high affective impact stimulus. 32 young women (M = 24,34; DS = 5,24) participated of the study. Correlations of Pearson were performed between accuracy measures of the behavioral task and fractional anisotropy of the white matter fascicles of interest. The results propose a brain connectivity network of emotional solving problems with the main participation of the Arcuate and Fronto Occipital Inferior fascicles of left hemisphere, both crucial in the implementation of lexical and semantic strategies to the reduction of affective impact.