Neurophysiological Markers for Emotion Regulation
Monday, April 16, 2007
Presented By
Presented by the Psychology Section
Speaker: Tracy Dennis, Hunter College
How we modify and control our emotions—or emotion regulation—has profound consequences for mental health and illness. Although many clinical disorders are characterized by excessive and poorly controlled negative emotions, both negative and positive emotions have been shown to promote adaptive behavior. To examine the complex links between emotion regulation and well-being, it is important to develop markers for adaptive emotion regulation. In this presentation, I will describe research that uses scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure neural markers for emotion regulation and emotion-attention interactions in children and adults. This work suggests that the degree to which cognitive resources are recruited in emotional contexts (both too much and too little) is related to the effectiveness of emotion regulation and to vulnerabilities for mood and anxiety disorders.