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Updated: Jun 17, 2026
08:09
Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
Self-related awareness and emotion regulation
Uwe Herwig1, Tina Kaffenberger, Lutz Jäncke
1Psychiatric University Hospital, University of Zürich, Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland. uwe.herwig@puk.zh.ch
Neuroimage
|January 5, 2010
Summary
Becoming aware of your emotions, even internally, can reduce emotional arousal. This finding supports mindfulness techniques for emotion regulation and mental health treatment.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Emotion regulation is a complex internal process.
- Existing neural models focus on external event control via prefrontal cortex and amygdala.
- Cognitive strategies like mindfulness are used clinically for stress and affective disorders.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate neural processing during internal self-referential emotion awareness.
- Examine brain activity during cognitive self-reflection and emotion introspection.
- Understand the neural basis of making current emotions and self-cognitions aware.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 30 healthy subjects.
- Task included cognitive self-reflection, emotion introspection, and neutral conditions.
- Compared brain activations between conditions in 27 subjects.
Main Results:
- Self-reflection and emotion introspection activated distinct medial/ventrolateral prefrontal and parietal areas, and the amygdala.
- Amygdala activity decreased during emotion introspection.
- Amygdala activity increased during self-reflection compared to neutral baseline.
Conclusions:
- Self-referential awareness of emotional states can attenuate emotional arousal.
- Findings extend emotion regulation theories.
- Implications for mindfulness in psychotherapy for affective disorders and daily emotion management.
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