Enhancing resilience, flexibility, and well-being through cognitive-emotional training: behavioral and neural...

College students often struggle to regulate emotions under changing academic and social stress, highlighting the need for interventions targeting adaptive emotion regulation (ER). Here, we tested a 5-week online intervention designed to enhance ER and cognitive flexibility in college students. Participants (N = 39) were pseudo-randomly assigned to the experimental (N = 20) or control (N = 19) group, with higher distress individuals preferentially assigned to the experimental condition. Behavioral, self-report, eye-tracking, and brain imaging measures were collected before and after the training. Compared to controls, the experimental group participants showed reduced emotional reactivity to negative stimuli and experiences, along with reduced visual attention to emotionally salient regions. They also showed improvements in the use of attention strategies, positive refocusing, and perceived cognitive control. In the imaging subsample (N = 23; Experimental: N = 15; Control: N = 8), these improvements were accompanied by changes in resting-state functional connectivity, including reduced coupling between affective and higher-order systems and increased efficiency of attentional control and self-referential pathways. These results suggest that training promoted more efficient and flexible interactions among emotion, attention, and cognitive control regions, providing a neural mechanism for the observed behavioral benefits. Overall, the findings support the intervention as a promising approach for improving adaptive ER and resilience during emerging adulthood.