# Psychopathology and Life Stress Effects on Neural Dynamics Supporting Emotion Inhibition

> **NIH NIH F31** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2020 · $17,095

## Abstract

Project Summary
Individuals with depression and anxiety have difficulty inhibiting their response to emotional information,
resulting in problematic attentional bias and altered brain connectivity. Individuals who have experienced life
stress demonstrate similar deficits, perhaps representing one mechanism by which early life stress and chronic
life stress contribute to the development of internalizing psychopathology such as depression and
anxiety. Although understanding dysfunction in emotion inhibition appears critical to characterizing how
experience across the lifespan contributes to deficits in emotion regulation and subsequent psychopathology,
little is known about the associated neural mechanisms. Successful inhibition of response to emotional
distraction in favor of responding to task-relevant information relies on complex and dynamic regulatory
processes as well as a variety of cognitive functions, such as attention and memory. In healthy individuals, the
effects of emotional context on the success of emotion inhibition differ as a function of the valence (positive or
negative) and arousal (low or high) of the context. In light of this, the proposed project examines the time
course of neural activity associated with emotion inhibition, emphasizing functional connectivity between brain
regions, and utilizes a novel protocol that pairs a color-word Stroop foreground task with an emotional image
context. This combination is designed to identify the impact of task-irrelevant emotional context (image emotion)
on the automatic, implicit inhibition of response to task-irrelevant information (word content) in favor of task-
relevant information (word color). Utilizing event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and EEG oscillatory analyses,
the project will determine the time course of neural activity associated with emotion inhibition along with
dynamic interactions between brain regions. The effects of early life stress (ELS) and current life stress (CLS)
on these processes will then be considered, focusing on associated alterations in the structure and function of
the brain areas associated with stress response and emotion processing, such as temporo-parietal, insula,
dACC, and prefrontal cortex. Disruptions in these regions are associated with biased attention, cognitive
inflexibility, and emotion dysregulation. This project will attempt to identify neural changes associated with
depression and anxiety during emotion inhibition as well as the role of ELS and CLS in those relationships.
This project has implications for interventions that may prevent or ameliorate internalizing disorders by
characterizing neural mechanisms in adult emotion regulation and their vulnerability to stress. Due to the
diverse academic and technological resources available, UCLA is an ideal environment in which to pursue this
project. Over the course of NRSA funding, the applicant will be exposed to extensive training in relevant
methods (ERP, EEG, MRI) and guided toward...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10071874
- **Project number:** 5F31MH118744-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Morgan E Bartholomew
- **Activity code:** F31 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $17,095
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-07-01 → 2021-09-10

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10071874

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10071874, Psychopathology and Life Stress Effects on Neural Dynamics Supporting Emotion Inhibition (5F31MH118744-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10071874. Licensed CC0.

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