The neural bases of emotion regulation

Abstract

Emotions are powerful determinants of behaviour, thought and experience, and they may be regulated in various ways. Neuroimaging studies have implicated several brain regions in emotion regulation, including the ventral anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortices, as well as the lateral prefrontal and parietal cortices. Drawing on computational approaches to value-based decision-making and reinforcement learning, we propose a unifying conceptual framework for understanding the neural bases of diverse forms of emotion regulation.