Emotional regulation

broadly define emotion regulation as the process of modulating an emotional experience in accordance with conscious or nonconscious goals (Etkin, Büchel, & Gross, 2015).

Implicit Emotional Regulations

• do not require conscious effort
• reflexive in nature

Developmental trajectories:

• Children have more difficulty in "effectively implicitly regulate emotion", but can with scaffolding form adults
• early childhood experiences can allow children to develop this ability faster or slower

I wonder whether children's ability to develop implicit emotion regulation systems would moderate the relation between early life adversity and life outcomes.

Explicit Emotional Regulation

• Deliberate attempt to control emotional states
• Example methods:
  • distraction
  • environment selection
  • suppression
  • cognitive reappraisal

Developmental trajectories:

• similar to implicit regulation
• little more comparing dev of of the types of regulation
• children tend to use distraction more than adults

Cognitive reappraisal

• associated with greater well-being than suppression. regiments for cognitive reappraisal

1. select attention to emotions that need to be adjusted
2. mentalize to monitor changing emotional states
3. hold reappraisals in working memory
4. select appropriate reappraisal and inhibit inappropriate ones

Methods of reappraisal:

• Distraction
• reinterpretation

Brain Regions Implicated in Emotional Regulation

Amygdala

• Detects encodies and appraises emotional stimuli
• often suppressed in emotional regulation Development:
• more active in childhood and adolescence

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC)

• associated with reward processing, social and affective processing, learning, self-referential thinking
• Involved in implicit more than explicit regulation
• functioning changes across childhood and adolescence

Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (lPFC)

• include both ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC; dlPFC)

Consistently, the lateral PFC plays an important role in exerting conscious, top-down, regulatory influences on affective processes.

• suppression or emotional displays
• reprisal of emotional experiences

Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex

• social cognitive processes, social infrastructure
• cognitive reprisal
• theory of mind

Network Level Dynamics

Specifically, we propose that vmPFCamygdala connectivity undergirds implicit regulation in adulthood whereas interactions between the amygdala, vlPFC, dlPFC, and dmPFC facilitate explicit regulation.

Implicit emotional regulation

• (In my own words) vmPFC is activated to reduce the amygdala response to the stimulus
• in children the vmPFC and amygdala activation is positively correlated, but this association becomes negative throughout development -> can this be viewed as the child's mind is fueling the emotional reaction -> Why would this have to do with myelination of the axons?

Explicit emotional regulation