It is a well-known and accepted fact that for a successful relationship, partners shouldn't go to bed angry. But new research from a psychologist at Harvard University suggests that brain activity, specifically in the region called the lateral prefrontal cortex, is a far better indicator of how someone will feel in the days following a fight with his or her partner.
Individuals who show more neural activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex are less likely to be upset the day after fighting with partners, according to the study. The findings point to the lateral prefrontal cortex's role in emotion regulation, and suggest that improved function within this region may also improve day-to-day mood.
It was found that as one might expect, everybody felt badly on the day of the conflict with their partners, say the authors. But the day after, people who had high lateral prefrontal cortex activity felt better and the people who had low lateral prefrontal cortex activity continued to feel badly.
Previously, research has shown that the lateral prefrontal cortex is associated with emotion regulation in laboratory tests, but the effect has never been proven to be connected to experiences in day-to-day life.
The study involved healthy couples in a relationship for longer than three months. While in the lab, participants were also tested for their broader cognitive control skills, such as their ability to control impulses and the shift and focus of attention. For three weeks, the couples also recorded in an online diary their daily emotional state and whether they had had a fight with their partners.
The researchers found that participants who displayed greater activity in their lateral prefrontal cortex while viewing their partners' negative facial expressions in the scanner were less likely to report a negative mood the day after a fight with their partners, indicating that they were better able to emotionally "bounce back" after the conflict.
The key factor is that the brain activity in the scanner predicted their experience in life, researchers note. Scientists believe that if we can connect what we see in the scanner to somebody's day-to-day emotion-regulation capacity, it could help psychologists predict how well people will respond to stressful events in their lives.
Although more work must be done to develop clinical applications for the research, it may be that lateral prefrontal cortex function provides information about a person's vulnerability to develop mood problems after a stressful event. This raises the question as to whether increasing lateral prefrontal cortex function will improve emotion regulation capacity.
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