| dc.description.abstract | Growing old is often accompanied by a number of physical and behavioral changes.
This includes, how emotions are perceived and regulated, which changes across the lifespan.
In fact, with increasing age we observe improved emotion regulation and overall a quicker recovery from negative emotions.
However, only a few studies have explored the functional organization that supports emotional function in aging on the level of large-scale brain networks.
The functional organization underlying emotion function and how it changes with age to produce diverse emotional outcomes remains unclear.
Alterations in behavior could be reflected in the functional integration of specialized emotion-related brain networks.
The aim of this study was to investigate how the functional network architecture of emotion generation and regulation networks changes with age and if alterations in these networks would result in different emotional outcomes.
We used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data provided by the Human Connectome Project - Aging to construct graphs from four large-scale networks involved in the emotional response.
We performed graph theoretical analysis on these graphs to assess the integration and segregation of the individual networks, as well as their respective regions of interest.
We found that the functional integration of two of these networks significantly changed during aging.
A network that consists of many frontal areas and is predominantly involved in emotion regulation and emotional control becomes more integrated across later age.
Yet, the brain network thought to mediate between emotion generation and regulation, which is also thought to be involved in interoceptive processes, becomes more segregated with increasing age.
Further, we performed mediation analyses to assess whether these findings can somehow be linked to behavioral changes.
Surprisingly, we found that the left cuneus, an area frequently studied the context of visual processing, mediates age-related declines in perceived stress and loneliness.
However, increased integration of the cuneus reduced the age-related effect on stress and loneliness; those individuals with higher integration of the cuneus also had higher perceived stress and loneliness.
Taken together, increasing integration of the emotion-regulation network, and increased segregation of the emotion-perception network might manifest as enhanced emotion regulation in later life.
Enhanced emotion regulation ability was related to decreased loneliness and perceived stress among older adults.
These findings reveal functional differences in emotion networks across lifespan and expand our understanding of network reconfiguration and its functional relevance to mental health in late adulthood. | |