High Thought Control Ability, High Resilience: The Effect of Temporal Cortex and Insula Connectivity

Abstract

Psychological resilience is always portrayed as the ability to rebound from adversity, which is essential for human mental health. Whereas thought control ability (TCA) is a reliable indicator of perceptual cognitive control and has a predictive effect on psychopathology. Whether and how resilience correlates with thought control are still unclear. The current study explored the whole-brain functional connectivity underlying resilience and its role in the association between resilience and TCA using resting-state fMRI. Results reveled a significant positive correlation between resilience and the functional connectivity of temporal cortex-insula, suggesting that individuals with high resilient ability exhibit flexible interaction between these two regions to facilitate emotional information processing. More importantly, a significant positive correlation between TCA and resilience was observed, and the functional connectivity of temporal cortex-insula has a significant mediation effect on the association between TCA and psychological resilience, revealing that individuals with high TCA show high levels of resilience ability through robust cognitive control on unwanted thoughts. In short, these results extended previous findings by shedding novel insights into the close relationship between resilience and TCA and the underlying neural mechanism.

Keywords: functional connectivity; psychological resilience; thought control ability.