Explicit and implicit emotion regulation: a multi-level framework

Abstract

The ability to adaptively regulate emotion is essential for mental and physical well-being. How should we organize the myriad ways people attempt to regulate their emotions? We explore the utility of a framework that distinguishes among four fundamental classes of emotion regulation strategies. The framework describes each strategy class in terms their behavioral characteristics, underlying psychological processes and supporting neural systems. A key feature of this multi-level framework is its conceptualization of the psychological processes in terms of two orthogonal dimensions that describe (i) the nature of the emotion regulation goal (ranging from to implicit to explicit) and (ii) the nature of the emotion change process (ranging from more automatic to more controlled). After describing the core elements of the framework, we use it to review human and animal research on the neural bases of emotion regulation and to suggest key directions for future research on emotion regulation.

Keywords: amygdala; emotion regulation; explicit; implicit; prefrontal cortex.

Fig. 1.

Description of the psychological dimensions involved in different kinds of emotion regulation. Location on the y-axis depicts the nature of the emotion regulation goal, and location on the x-axis depicts the nature of the change process. (A) Dots represent the typically studied instantiations of emotion regulation strategies. (B) Dashed lines indicate the rough boundaries of four classes of emotion regulation.

Fig. 2.

Theoretical locations of different emotion regulation strategies within the goal and process space. Dashed lines indicate the locations that could be occupied by different instantiations of an emotion regulation strategy.

Fig. 3.

Four classes of emotion regulation, their neural systems, and behavioral strategies. The neural systems involved in each class of emotion regulation are illustrated. The specific regions and combinations of regions involved may vary, in particular for explicit-controlled and implicit-automatic regulation. The regions depicted were chosen because they represent the current literature.

Fig. 4.

Description of emotion regulation strategies at multiple-levels. Reappraisal (A) and extinction (B) are described at the levels of behavior, psychological processes and brain systems. Brain regions colored blue are thought to be involved in regulation, whereas brain regions colored red are thought to be modulated by regulation.