People are confronted every day with internal or external stimuli that can elicit emotions. In order to avoid negative ones, or to pursue individual aims, emotions are often regulated. The available emotion regulation strategies have been previously described as efficient or inefficient, but many studies highlighted that the strategies’ efficiency may be influenced by some different aspects such as personality. In this project, the efficiency of several strategies (e.g., reappraisal, suppression, distraction, …) has been studied according to personality profiles, by using the Big Five personality model and the Maladaptive Personality Trait Model. Moreover, the strategies’ efficiency has been tested according to the main emotional responses, namely experience, expressivity and physiological arousal. Results mainly highlighted the differential impact of strategies on individuals and a slight impact of personality. An important factor seems however to be the emotion parameter we are considering, potentially revealing a complex interplay between strategy, personality, and the considered emotion response. Based on these outcomes, further clinical aspects and recommendations will be also discussed.

The ability to effectively regulate emotions is a fundamental skill related to physical and psychological health. In this talk, I will present behavioral and fMRI data from several different studies that examined cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and suppression emotion regulation strategies in healthy controls participants and in the context of randomized trials of cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness- based stress reduction, and aerobic exercise as interventions for adults with anxiety disorders. We will also examine the implementation of different types of functional connectivity analytic approaches to probe intervention-related brain mechanism changes.

Drug addiction is a chronically relapsing disorder characterized by compulsive drug use despite catastrophic personal consequences (e.g., loss of family, job) and even when the substance is no longer perceived as pleasurable. In this talk, I will present results of human neuroimaging studies, utilizing a multimodal approach (neuropsychology, functional magnetic resonance imaging, event-related potentials recordings), to explore the neurobiology underlying the core psychological impairments in drug addiction (impulsivity, drive/motivation, insight/awareness) as associated with its clinical symptomatology (intoxication, craving, bingeing, withdrawal). The focus of this talk is on understanding the role of the dopaminergic mesocorticolimbic circuit, and especially the prefrontal cortex, in higher-order executive dysfunction (e.g., disadvantageous decision-making such as trading a car for a couple of cocaine hits) in drug addicted individuals. The theoretical model that guides the presented research is called iRISA (Impaired Response Inhibition and Salience Attribution), postulating that abnormalities in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, as related to dopaminergic dysfunction, contribute to the core clinical symptoms in drug addiction. Specifically, our multi-modality program of research is guided by the underlying working hypothesis that drug addicted individuals disproportionately attribute reward value to their drug of choice at the expense of other potentially but no-longer-rewarding stimuli, with a concomitant decrease in the ability to inhibit maladaptive drug use. In this talk I will also explore whether treatment (as usual) and 6-month abstinence enhance recovery in these brain-behavior compromises in treatment seeking cocaine addicted individuals. Promising neuroimaging studies, which combine pharmacological (i.e., oral methylphenidate, or RitalinTM) and salient cognitive tasks or functional connectivity during resting-state, will be discussed as examples for using neuroimaging for empirically guiding the development of effective neurorehabilitation strategies (encompassing cognitive reappraisal and transcranial direct current stimulation) in drug addiction.