Ventrolateral but not Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex tDCS effectively impact emotion reappraisal – effects on Emotional Experience and Interbeat Interval

Emotions can be understood as behavioral, physiological, and subjective individual’s alteration due to a given situation. Several times, an efficient regulation of these emotions can promote psychological and social survival. It has been demonstrated that the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) presents a relevant role in cognitive control, especially during emotion regulation strategies. However, evidence for the role of the PFC and emotional regulation comes mostly from neuroimaging experiments lacking from causal information. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has been shown to be an efficient noninvasive neuromodulation technique capable to address causal hypothesis. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of two regions of the PFC (Dorsolateral and Ventrolateral region) on different strategies of emotional reappraisal during the observation of negative images. 180 undergraduate students (mean age 21,75 ± 3,38) participated in this study, divided in two experiments (Dorsolateral PFC - n = 90; Ventrolateral PFC - n = 90). As not expected, DLPFC tDCS did not modulate the responses on the emotional regulation task. However, VLPFC tDCS resulted in less negative valence of negative images as well as decreased cardiac interbeat interval on earlier moments of emotional processing. These findings supports the general view about the role of the PFC on emotional regulation and, at the same time, advances the field by providing evidence that evaluation of negative stimuli is much more based on the VLPFC than on the DLPCF.