Limitations & future directions
anxiety
SECONDARY, BREAST CANCER
There are several limitations to the study. First, some of our BC participants underwent the fMRI assessment after undergoing their surgical treatment. Although our secondary analysis showed that including surgery timing as a covariate did not change the main finding, future studies would benefit from assessing emotion reactivity/regulation in BC patients before they experienced their surgical treatment. Second, a small number of the BC patients were receiving chemotherapy at the time of their fMRI assessments. Although this happened in both the BMX and the non‐BMX groups, we cannot exclude the possibility that undergoing chemotherapy could have influenced participants' emotion reactivity and regulation. Third, we used BC‐related pictures to induce negative emotion but not necessarily cancer‐related anxiety in particular. Also, pictures presented in a lab setting may not fully simulate real‐life experience of cancer‐related negative emotions, although they likely stimulate affect related to the experience of women with breast cancer. Future research is encouraged to employ other paradigms to assess real‐life cancer‐related anxiety directly.