ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2020
Neural mechanisms of self-affirmation's stress buffering effects.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effect of music and affirmation listening on symptom management, psychological resilience, and anxiety levels in women with breast cancer.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2025Trial
- Synergistic pathways to psychosis: understanding developmental risk and resilience factors.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Do Negative Self-Evaluative Emotions Enhance Healthier Food Choices? Exploring the Moderating Role of Self-Affirmation.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Effectiveness of Self-Affirmation Interventions in Educational Settings: A Meta-Analysis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- The VLPFC-Engaged Voluntary Emotion Regulation: Combined TMS-fMRI Evidence for the Neural Circuit of Cognitive Reappraisal.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Amygdala and nucleus accumbens activation during reward anticipation moderates the association between life stressor frequency and depressive symptoms.Journal of affective disorders · 2023Article
- Brain Reward Circuits Promote Stress Resilience and Health: Implications for Reward-Based Interventions.Current directions in psychological science · 2023Article
- What Racism Has to Do with It: Understanding and Reducing Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Youth of Color.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Influencing Factors of Psychological Well-Being of the Non-designated Hospital Staff in China During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- Health neuroscience 2.0: integration with social, cognitive and affective neuroscience.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
- Impact of social reward on stress circuit function and regulation: Path differences between value affirmation and emotional support.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Self-affirmation can buffer stress responses across different contexts, yet the neural mechanisms for these effects are unknown. Self-affirmation has been shown to increase activity in reward-related neural regions, including the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). Given that reward-related prefrontal cortical regions such as the VMPFC are involved in reducing neurobiological and behavioral responses to stress, we hypothesized that self-affirmation would activate VMPFC and also reduce neural responses to stress in key neural threat system regions such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI). We explored this hypothesis using self-affirmation and evaluative stress tasks following a within-subjects design in the fMRI scanner. Consistent with prior work, self-affirmation blocks led to lower self-reported stress and improved performance. With respect to neural activity, compared to control blocks, self-affirmation blocks led to greater VMPFC activity, and subsequently less left AI (but not dACC) activity during stress task blocks. Functional connectivity analyses revealed greater connectivity between the VMPFC and left and right AI during self-affirmation compared to control. These findings begin to articulate the neural circuits involved in self-affirmation's effects during exposure to stressors, and more broadly specify neural reward-based responses to stressful situations.
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