Review articleCapacity and tendency: A neuroscientific framework for the study of emotion regulation
Introduction
Though emotions are generally adaptive, they can lead to mental and physical health problems if left unchecked [9], [38], [44], [51], [53], [99]. Emotion regulation – the use of conscious or unconscious processes that change the nature, intensity or duration of one’s emotions – is central to wellbeing [41], [78].
Emotion regulation is driven jointly by one’s tendency to choose a specific regulatory strategy and one’s capacity to implement said strategy effectively [10], [25], [42], [79]. Initial evidence suggests that regulatory tendency and capacity co-develop during childhood [71] and are related but not synonymous in adulthood [69]. While recent reviews have begun to characterize “different flavors” of emotion regulation by distinguishing between model-based and model-free or implicit and explicit forms of emotion regulation [11], [32], prevailing models have not yet taken into account the complementary significance of regulatory capacity and tendency [25], [78], [82], [93]. Here, we review existing neuroimaging findings related to the generation and regulation of emotion and then outline future directions for how regulatory capacity and tendency might be integrated in basic, developmental, and translational research.
Section snippets
Emotion generation
Before considering how emotions are regulated, it is useful to consider how emotional responses are generated. For the purposes of this review, we define emotions as reasonably coherent combinations of affective experience, behavior and physiological activity that arise in response to motivationally-relevant stimuli [50], [58], [60], [67]. Appraisal models suggest that emotions unfold in a series of steps that involve perceiving, attending to, interpreting and responding to an internal or
Mutual reinforcement of regulation capacity and tendency in lateral prefrontal and parietal systems
The extant literature demonstrates that reappraisal capacity is supported by interactions between dlPFC, vlPFC, dmPFC, PPC and the amygdala [12], [82]. Critically, neural responses to affective stimuli in these same brain regions predicts the tendency to reappraise [26], [29]. This raises the question of how closely linked individual differences associated with capacity and tendency are. One unexplored possibility is that the strength of association between capacity and tendency changes during
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