Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation in Adolescents and Emerging Adults: A Meta-analytic Study

The development of adaptive implicit and explicit emotion regulation skills is crucial for mental health. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are periods of heightened risk for psychopathology associated with emotion dysregulation, and neurodevelopmental mechanisms have been proposed to account for this increased risk. However, progress in understanding these mechanisms has been hampered by an incomplete knowledge of the neural underpinnings of emotion regulation during development.

Using activation likelihood estimation, we conducted a quantitative analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in healthy developmental samples (i.e., adolescence [10-18 years of age] and emerging adulthood [19-30 years of age]) investigating emotion reactivity (N studies = 48), and implicit (N studies = 41) and explicit (N studies = 19) emotion regulation processes.

Explicit emotion regulation was associated with activation in frontal, temporal, and parietal regions, whereas both implicit regulation and emotion reactivity were associated with activation in the amygdala and posterior temporal regions. During implicit regulation, adolescents exhibited more consistent activation of the amygdala, fusiform gyrus, and thalamus than emerging adults, who showed more consistent activation in the posterior superior temporal sulcus.

Our results suggest that emotion reactivity and regulation in developmental samples engage a robust group of regions that are implicated in bottom-up and top-down emotional responding. Adolescents are also more likely to recruit regions involved in early stages of emotion processing during implicit regulation, while emerging adults recruit higher-order regions involved in the extraction of semantic meaning. Findings have implications for future research aiming to better understand the neurodevelopmental mechanisms underlying risk for psychopathology.