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A Network Approach to Understanding the Emotion Regulation Benefits of Aerobic Exercise

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Abstract

Regular and even single sessions of aerobic exercise may benefit emotional health. Experiments show that prior exercise hastens emotional recovery following a stressor despite not changing reports of rumination or other emotion regulation difficulties. We use network analyses to explore whether traditional approaches for conceptualizing and measuring rumination (i.e. sum scores) could be occluding exercise-induced changes to emotion regulation. Participants (n = 226) were randomly assigned to a cycling (n = 113) or stretching control condition (n = 113). They then underwent a stressful speech task, followed by a recovery period. State rumination was measured through self-report. Graphical LASSO and relative importance networks and accompanying strength centrality indices were computed. Similar patterns emerged in both models. Declines in the strength centrality of self-criticism in the cycling group stood out. Exercise may alter the relations between rumination processes and target self-criticism in particular. This perspective offers important information about how exercise enhances well-being through emotion regulation as well as how to intervene on emotion regulation deficits more generally.

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Data Availability

Data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. As a final exploratory analysis, we employed a novel approach in which condition was included as a dichotomous node within the network (e.g., Blanken et al. 2019; Kraft et al. 2019). Results revealed that condition did not share a statistically significant edge with any rumination node, suggesting that group assignment did not affect the level of any given rumination component. Self-criticism remained the most central node in this updated model. Note that this new analytic approach was developed to examine treatment effects across time, rather than between group differences at single time points as was done in the present paradigm. This approach may be more appropriate for examining the existence and course of longitudinal effects of exercise as an intervention for rumination.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Isabel Alexander, Sabrina Bell, Antonia Bruehl, Mikaela Carter, Stephanie Ferrarie, Gregory Gozzo, Danielle Krzyszczyk, Olivia Losiewicz, Marieke Meier, Micaela Rodriguez, Calvin Stewart, Sophia Yanis, and Hannah Zarzecki for their assistance.

Funding

This project was supported by the Gordon W. Allport Memorial Fund Research Grant from Harvard University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Emily E. Bernstein & Richard J. McNally

  2. Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Institute of Neuroscience, Université Catholique de Louvain, Place du Cardinal Mercier, 10, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Alexandre Heeren

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  1. Emily E. Bernstein
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Correspondence to Emily E. Bernstein.

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Author Emily E. Bernstein, Author Alexandre Heeren, and Author Richard J. McNally declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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All procedures performed were in accordance with the ethical standards of Harvard University’s Committee on the Use of Human Subjects and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Bernstein, E.E., Heeren, A. & McNally, R.J. A Network Approach to Understanding the Emotion Regulation Benefits of Aerobic Exercise. Cogn Ther Res 44, 52–60 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-019-10039-6

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