Chapter 16 - EmotionRegulation

Summary

This chapter draws on existing frameworks for understanding emotion regulation to critically review a large and growing body of work in affective and cognitive neuroscience on the cognitive regulation of emotion. It focuses on studies employing neuroimaging, which is one powerful and widely used method to delineate the neural mechanisms underlying the capacity to flexibly alter and refine the experience of emotions in humans. Emotion regulation has a far-reaching impact on multiple aspects of health, disease, and interpersonal functioning and is now recognized as a critical area of study in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. The chapter presents studies that experimentally manipulate the direction of attention by instructing subjects to pay attention to the nonemotional/nonperceptual aspects of an evocative stimulus. Research over the last decade has elucidated the functional neuroanatomy of the regulation of emotions, focusing on cognitive strategies aimed at attention modification and interpretation change.