With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Gabrieli and colleagues will conduct a three-year investigation of the maturation of the brain systems that support emotion regulation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a noninvasive technique that can identify brain regions recruited for specific emotion and cognition processes. Children and young adults, ages 8 to 30, will participate in two experiments that examine how they regulate an initial emotional response to either highly negative or highly positive photos. These studies will identify what brain regions initially respond to negative or positive emotional experiences, and what brain regions then support cognitive regulation of those emotional responses. Of greatest interest is how these brain responses mature, or change, from late childhood through early adulthood.
Emotion regulation, the subject of this research, is a fundamental aspect of human experience and behavior, and the interaction between thoughts (cognition) and feelings (emotions) that guides how people evaluate and act on what is going on around them. Successful emotion regulation makes people resilient to difficult circumstances, and thus can help people avoid distress or psychiatric diseases such as major depression. Successful regulation also promotes prosocial behaviors, such as not behaving violently in response to feelings of anger. It is generally thought that children and adolescents have emotions as strongly felt as do adults, but that the cognitive regulation of emotion matures slowly as children and adolescents learn how to regulate their feelings in ways that promote positive social interaction and long-term mental health. Risky behaviors that pose severe health threats for adolescents may reflect the faster maturation of emotion than cognitive aspects of emotion regulation. Although emotion regulation is thus important for health and for social functioning, little is known about its underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. For example, it is unknown whether people use the same brain systems to regulate negative and positive emotions. Further, nothing is known about how these mechanisms support the normal maturation of emotion regulation in childhood and adolescents. The findings from this research may also illuminate the roots of mental diseases that reflect a disadvantageous development of emotion regulation pathways of the human brain.
