Interhemispheric balance of prefrontal cortex and emotion regulation: a neuromodulatory, behavioral and psychophysiological study

Abstract

Emotions can be understood as behavioral, physiological, and subjective individuals alteration due to a given situation. Several times, an efficient regulation of these emotions can promote psychological and social survival. In this sense, recent publication demonstrate that the prefrontal cortex present a relevant role in cognitive control, specially during emotion regulation strategies. At the same time, the transcranial direct current stimulation has been shown to be an efficient technique neuromodulation in causal study between cortical structures and cognitive functions such as emotion regulation. Therefore, this study will have as main objective to investigate the effect of inter-hemispheric balancing two regions of the PFC (dorsolateral and ventrolateral region) using different montages of tDCS on different strategies of emotional reassessment during the evaluation of images of content negative. The purpose of this investigate the specificity of the involvement of both structures, with respect to the inter-hemispheric balance during emotion regulation in healthy participants, with respect to emotional assessment, electrodermal activity, and electrocardiographic activity. This study is justified, since the study of the regulation of emotional neuropsychophysiology be between a major topics to be studied in the psychology today. Furthermore, little is known about the causal bilateral relationship CPF in emotional regulation, which strengthens the search for studies on this topic using neuromodulation techniques such as tDCS. (AU)