Abstract
Background
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.
Methods
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.
Results
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.
Conclusions
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.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: August 14, 2020
Accepted:
August 11,
2020
Received in revised form:
August 10,
2020
Received:
March 13,
2020
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 Society of Biological Psychiatry.
