How working memory training improves emotion regulation: neural efficiency, effort, and transfer effects.

Editor's Note: These short, critical reviews of recent papers in the Journal, written exclusively by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, are intended to summarize the important findings of the paper and provide additional insight and commentary. For more information on the format and purpose of the Journal Club, please see Review of Schweizer et al. Deficient regulation of emotion is a core problem across psychopathologies—such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder (Gross, 2013)—that remains even after remission (Kanske et al., 2012). The development of better and more cost-effective interventions aimed at improving emotion regulation abilities could offer substantial benefit to individuals and society at large. The main goal for such interventions is to achieve robust transfer effects, such that training on a specific task leads to more generalized improvement in emotion regulation. Achieving this is problematic because the relatively low-level processes that are most amenable to training, such as attention and working memory, are far less complex than the high-level processes that must be modified for the intervention to improve emotion regulation in real life. One of the great, but hitherto largely unfulfilled, promises of cognitive neuroscience is that it can help bridge such gaps by using brain data to identify the component neural systems of complex higher-level processes. As a consequence of extensive neuroimag-ing research on emotion, we are now in a position where such a decomposition can be undertaken, and mechanistic neural models of emotion regulation are proposed (Ochsner et al., 2012). These models might lead to the development of interventions that improve emotion regulation abilities indirectly, by improving the function of its neural subsystems. A recent example of this approach is the paper by Schweizer and colleagues (2013), showing that a short, inexpensive, and easily accessible regime of neurally targeted working memory (WM) training can lead to improvements in emotion regulation. The study is based on the observation that the neural networks supporting emotion regulation largely overlap with the frontoparietal " multiple-demand " network (Duncan, 2010) implicated in working memory performance. Accordingly, there may be a link between these two capacities, such that improvements in one will lead to improvements in the other by enhancing general functioning of the frontoparietal network. Schweizer et al. tested this hypothesis by having participants undergo a 20 d training program involving a daily 20 –30 min performance of either a challenging dual n-back emotional WM task or a placebo training without …