Emotion regulation across the life span

Being able to flexibly regulate one's emotions is critical for adaptive functioning across the life span. The importance of emotion regulation for human cognition has been reflected in the marked increase in the amount of psychologic research on emotion and its regulation in the past two decades. In this chapter, we review theoretical and empirical advances in this research, with a particular focus on the neural bases of emotion regulation. We begin with a brief overview of the field at present and provide a general primer on the behavioral and neuroimaging methods used to study emotion regulation. We then outline the brain regions involved in both triggering and modulating affect, and how they may change throughout development and into old age. Finally, we conclude with a roadmap for the future study of emotion regulation, in particular focusing on how to integrate measures with high ecologic validity (e.g., experience sampling, social emotion regulation) with neuroimaging techniques.