What is it about?
Emotions shape our everyday life and influence how we think, feel and act. But people differ dramatically in how well they handle hard feelings; some can effectively control the feelings while others struggle to do so. Why is that? And can we tell who is better at regulating emotion by scanning their brains? To this end, we recorded people’s brain while they viewed negative images and tried to reduce the negative experiences. Using a whole-brain organization approach that captures the brain dynamics of emotion regulation, we found that people who were better at regulating their emotions showed larger shifts in brain activity from sensorimotor regions toward higher-order association regions.
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Why is it important?
Understanding why people differ in their ability to regulate emotion has been a central question in cognitive neuroscience, while traditional approaches fail to capture the complex individual differences. Our whole-brain approach brings together previous neuroimaging findings and provides a novel and robust biomarker of emotion regulation success.
Perspectives
It is crucial to view the brain as a dynamic system when considering how it copes with negative feelings. The ability to flexibly shift between brain states may be key to adaptive functioning. I also hope that our whole-brain approach can be extended to clinical populations characterized by emotional dysfunction, ultimately helping to inform prevention, diagnosis, and treatment monitoring.
Ruien Wang
Queen's University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emotion regulation success involves systematic gradient-based reconfigurations of large-scale activation patterns in the human brain, PLoS Biology, April 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003666.
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