中国科学院心理健康重点实验室知识库

The present study examined whether brain activities of metaphorical restructuring could predict improvements in emotion and general self-efficacy (GSES). Sixty-two anxious graduates were randomly assigned to either the metaphor group (n = 31) or the literal group (n = 31). After completing the pretest (T1), the partic-ipants were first presented with micro-counseling dialogues (MCD) to guide metaphorical or literal restructuring, and their functional brain activities were simultaneously recorded. They then completed the posttest (T2) and 1 week's follow-up (T3). It was found that (1) compared with the literal group, the metaphor group had more insightful experiences, a greater increase in positive affect and GSES at T2, and a greater decrease in psycholog-ical distress at T2 and T3; (2) the metaphor group showed a greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and bilateral temporal gyrus, and further activation in the left hippocampus positively predicted T2 GSES scores while that in the IFG and left hippocampus positively predicted the reduction slope of distress over the three time points. One important limitation is that the results should be interpreted with caution when generalizing to clinical anxiety samples due to the participants were graduate students with anxiety symptoms rather than clinical sam-ple. These results indicated that metaphor restructuring produced greater symptom improvements, and activation in the hippocampus and IFG could predict these symptom improvements. This suggests that the activation of the two regions during the restructuring intervention may be a neural marker for symptom improvements.(c) 2023 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.