Neurocognitive bases of emotion regulation development in adolescence

Abstract

Emotion regulation is the ability to recruit processes to influence emotion generation. In recent years there has been mounting interest in how emotions are regulated at behavioural and neural levels, as well as in the relevance of emotional dysregulation to psychopathology. During adolescence, brain regions involved in affect generation and regulation, including the limbic system and prefrontal cortex, undergo protracted structural and functional development. Adolescence is also a time of increasing vulnerability to internalising and externalising psychopathologies associated with poor emotion regulation, including depression, anxiety and antisocial behaviour. It is therefore of particular interest to understand how emotion regulation develops over this time, and how this relates to ongoing brain development. However, to date relatively little research has addressed these questions directly. This review will discuss existing research in these areas in both typical adolescence and in adolescent psychopathology, and will highlight opportunities for future research. In particular, it is important to consider the social context in which adolescent emotion regulation develops. It is possible that while adolescence may be a time of vulnerability to emotional dysregulation, scaffolding the development of emotion regulation during this time may be a fruitful preventative target for psychopathology.

Keywords: Adolescence; Emotion regulation; Prefrontal cortex; Psychopathology; fMRI.

Fig. 1

(a) The process model (Gross and Thompson, 2007) posits that each of the four points in the emotion generation process can be subjected to regulation. From this approach, the process model suggests five different aspects of emotion regulation (situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change and response modulation) that correspond to the regulation of a particular point in the emotion generation process. Reprinted with permission from Guilford Press and J. Gross. (b) The extended process model of emotion regulation. (a) The World (W) gives rise to Perception (P). When valued as either negative or positive, these Valuations (V; known as emotions) give rise to Actions (A) that can change the state of the World. The model classifies three stages of emotion regulation: identification (which involves deciding whether to regulate emotions or not), selection (which involves deciding which strategy to use), and implementation (which involves implementing the chosen strategy). This may change the first-level Valuation system. Reprinted with permission from G. Sheppes.