Most of our measures of a key cognitive process don't agree

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It’s widely acknowledged that it’s nearly impossible to publish negative results in scientific journals. “We didn’t see anything” is a much harder sell than finding that a hypothesis is clearly right. Findings of no effect tend to either be shuffled off to low-profile journals or left behind as unpublished lab lore. The high-profile journal Nature, however, made a notable exception this week, publishing a study that tells us that a bunch of methods we have been using to try to measure a key emotional ability don’t seem to be measuring the same thing. The results mean that we don’t have a good way to measure the impact of a concept that is the basis of a key method in therapy.

众所周知，在科学期刊上发表负面结果几乎是不可能的。“我们什么也没发现”远不如证明一个假设完全正确那样容易被接受。无效的研究结果往往要么被推送到低知名度的期刊上，要么作为未发表的实验室轶事被遗忘。然而，知名期刊《自然》本周做出了一个值得注意的例外，发表了一项研究，告诉我们我们一直在用来衡量某种关键情绪能力的多种方法似乎并非在衡量同一件事。这些结果意味着，我们目前还没有一种好的方法来衡量一个作为治疗关键方法基础的概念的影响。

Inconsistencies: One of the most successful forms of therapy is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. In part, CBT is based on getting people to step back and engage in “cognitive reappraisal.” This requires people to think over a situation that has caused a negative emotional response and find ways to reinterpret it so that it has less impact on them. The ability to engage in this process has been linked to emotional resilience. Given its importance, a lot of studies have looked at what’s going on in the brain when people engage in cognitive reappraisal. There are also a number of questionnaires that are thought to measure a person’s capacity to engage in the process.

不一致性：认知行为疗法（CBT）是最成功的治疗形式之一。在某种程度上，CBT的基础是让人们退后一步，进行“认知重评”。这要求人们反思导致负面情绪反应的情况，并找到重新解读它的方法，从而减轻其影响。参与这一过程的能力与情绪韧性有关。鉴于其重要性，许多研究探讨了人们在进行认知重评时大脑中发生了什么。此外，还有许多问卷被认为可以衡量一个人参与该过程的能力。

So, a large international collaboration of researchers decided to look at these more carefully. “We focused on three widely used indices that are often assumed to reflect related facets of reappraisal capacity: trait questionnaires, task-based affective ratings following reappraisal, and amygdala down-regulation during reappraisal,” they wrote. The amygdala is a structure deep in the brain that tends to be active when people have emotional responses to events (as well as in a wide variety of additional circumstances). So, it makes sense to expect that it would be less active if people were trying to tone down their emotions. But to find out whether that’s actually correct, you need to look at brain activity.

因此，一个大型国际研究合作团队决定更仔细地审视这些指标。他们写道：“我们重点研究了三个被广泛使用的指标，这些指标通常被认为反映了重评能力的各个相关方面：特质问卷、重评后的基于任务的情绪评分，以及重评期间的杏仁核下调。”杏仁核是大脑深处的一个结构，当人们对事件产生情绪反应时（以及在各种其他情况下），它往往会变得活跃。因此，如果人们试图平复情绪，预期它会变得不那么活跃是有道理的。但要弄清楚这是否正确，你需要观察大脑活动。

Here, the team relied on 40 functional MRI data sets, providing a large enough data set to tease out even relatively small effects. Which is a good thing, because the effects really were hard to detect. “The effect size was comparatively small: To detect this effect size with a statistical power of 80 percent, a single study would need to test 1,105 participants,” the researchers note, going on to say that very few fMRI studies have access to anywhere near that many subjects. But there were even bigger problems when the differences among individuals in the MRI data were compared to their differences in the questionnaires or task-based ratings. Almost none of the variance in the different measures correlated with each other.

在这里，研究团队依赖于40个功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）数据集，提供了足够大的数据集来梳理出即使是相对较小的效应。这是一件好事，因为这些效应确实很难检测到。研究人员指出：“效应量相对较小：要以80%的统计功效检测到这种效应量，单项研究需要测试1105名参与者。”他们接着表示，很少有fMRI研究能接触到接近这个数量的受试者。但当将MRI数据中个体间的差异与问卷或基于任务的评分中的差异进行比较时，出现了更大的问题。不同测量方法中的方差几乎没有任何相关性。

An issue of timing? Further issues became apparent when the researchers started looking at activity in the areas of the brain that are responsible for high-level decision-making. If people were really engaging their ability to re-evaluate emotional triggers, presumably these areas should be active, as they are needed to power the re-evaluation process. But that wasn’t what the fMRI data showed. Instead, there was a correlation between the response of the amygdala and the response elsewhere in the brain. In other words, if the amygdala was very active, implying a stronger emotional response, then activity in the decision-making areas of the brain was also higher. If the emotional response seemed tamped down, then activity in the reasoning centers was lower as well.

时机问题？当研究人员开始观察大脑中负责高级决策区域的活动时，进一步的问题显现出来。如果人们真的在运用他们重新评估情绪触发因素的能力，那么这些区域理应是活跃的，因为它们是驱动重评过程所必需的。但fMRI数据并非如此显示。相反，杏仁核的反应与大脑其他部位的反应之间存在相关性。换句话说，如果杏仁核非常活跃，意味着情绪反应更强烈，那么大脑决策区域的活动也更高。如果情绪反应似乎被抑制了，那么推理中心的活动也较低。

In a bit of an understatement, the researchers declared, “These findings call for a fundamental reassessment of how reappraisal capacity is measured and interpreted across behavioural and neural levels of analysis.” The primary issue is that these three ways of looking at emotional regulation were thought to be exploring the same thing, but it’s clear that they’re not. As the researchers point out, this probably shouldn’t be viewed as a surprise. The questionnaires typically ask about overall personality tendencies, and so cover a very long time period. The answers are also likely to implicate a variety of traits beyond simple emotional control.

研究人员轻描淡写地宣称：“这些发现要求我们对如何在行为和神经分析层面衡量和解释重评能力进行根本性的重新评估。”主要问题在于，这三种观察情绪调节的方法曾被认为是在探索同一件事，但显然并非如此。正如研究人员指出的那样，这可能不应被视为令人惊讶。问卷通常询问整体人格倾向，因此涵盖了很长的时间跨度。答案也可能涉及除简单情绪控制之外的各种特质。

Both the task-based ratings and fMRI work, by contrast, capture in-the-moment responses. But they do so under very, very different experimental circumstances—namely, one of them involves being stuffed in an MRI tube. Beyond that, many of the fMRI experiments involve simplifying the process of emotional regulation in order to get consistent data. It’s entirely possible that these differences also influence brain activity in a variety of ways. So, the take-home appears to be that re-evaluation of emotional responses may be a real phenomenon, but we don’t currently have tools that can clearly capture the process effectively.

相比之下，基于任务的评分和fMRI工作都捕捉的是即时反应。但它们是在非常、非常不同的实验环境下进行的——即其中一种涉及被塞进MRI管中。此外，许多fMRI实验为了获得一致的数据，简化了情绪调节的过程。这些差异完全有可能以多种方式影响大脑活动。因此，结论似乎是：对情绪反应的重新评估可能是一种真实存在的现象，但我们目前还没有能够有效且清晰地捕捉这一过程的工具。

Gaining that ability may require developing new methods, and thinking more clearly about what different stages of the re-evaluation process require. In the meantime, the people behind this work caution that “strong claims about a person’s emotion regulation capacity based on any specific brain region should be made with considerable caution.”

获得这种能力可能需要开发新的方法，并更清晰地思考重评过程的不同阶段需要什么。与此同时，这项工作的研究人员提醒说：“基于任何特定大脑区域对个人情绪调节能力所做的强有力断言，都应持相当谨慎的态度。”