Of course! This information should be in the supplements (Table S4) linked next to the preprint (osf.io/ebj6u/ ). There, you have to go to the "files" tab to see the supplements. I think it's not super optimal how psyarxiv places supplements 🤷‍♂️

...to point out how we can reach a systematic (but slow) fundament, are in my experience much harder to publish and don't receive a lot of interest. I still see this discrepancy clearly with positive/negative publications. And this prevents biology from having a meaningful impact on mental health

Personal note:
I am deeply frustrated with the way science promotes positive findings. There is an endless line of prominent biomarkers, explaining why one person differs from another. In my areas, they all fall apart over time and leave barely anything to build on. Negative findings, which try...

My take-away:
The frontal lobe might indicate emotion regulation capability, but we have no direct evidence for this. From the current literature the answer would be: No.

Until we improve questionnaires, tasks, and fMRI and actually show this, we need to stop making such strong statements IMO

E.g., if a person has different vascularity due to aging, they will show different whole-brain responses. And these effects are much larger than those we are actually targeting. Therefore, between-person fMRI easily needs N around 1000, casting doubts on large parts of the clinical fMRI literature

That people with larger amygdala responses (than others) also have larger responses in the rest of the brain means: People differ in their global brain responses, likely due to purely methodological issues and confounding. As we show, this is an issue for task-based fMRI as a whole, beyond emotion.

These are all *between-person* effects. Hence, this is about comparing capability between different people (e.g. akin to comparing clinical versus healthy groups or along dimensional measures).

*Within-person* fMRI compares different conditions in the same individuals and overall works super well.

When you correlate these three outcomes with brain-wide responses on a between-person level (explanation later), you see that trait questionnaires correlate with nothing, task-based ratings correlate with small responses outside emotion regulation networks and the amygdala correlates with everything

Lesson 2) People who are better at down-regulating their emotional task responses are barely better at down-regulate their amygdala (compared to other people)

...despite the fact that decoding of emotional ratings from fMRI works super well for emotional *states* over time. Largely a methods issue.

Notably, most questionnaires aim to measure habits rather than ability and have low correlations with what people are actually doing in their daily lives. The latter is also true for experimental tasks. So, the issue are likely both questionnaire and task design, as well as their alignment

There are three common outcomes used to indicate who is better at emotion regulation. These three outcome types barely overlap.

There are two important lessons from this:
1) Already the most used trait questionnaires and task-based self-reports do not correlate, i.e. measure unrelated things

The problem: When most clinical fMRI studies find a group difference in the frontal lobe, they conclude an issue with emotion regulaiton. Even in psychotherapy and journalism, the frontal lobe is often the suspect for such deficits. But the evidence is actually lacking a lot.

This was a huge amount of work and although most co-authors are unfortuantely not on bluesky, I want to thank them all for the amazing support and, most importantly, their patience!

/end

@aidangcw.bsky.social

5) There are methodological reasons why regions and networks generally can't work well as neural measures for individual difference questions in task-based fMRI (e.g., group comparisons). And we can probably do something about this!

4/