Emotion regulation capacity lacks a shared neural signature

Key Points:

• A large-scale meta-analysis of 40 fMRI datasets (up to 2,175 participants) found no meaningful convergence among three common indices of cognitive reappraisal capacity—trait questionnaires, task-based affective ratings, and amygdala down-regulation—and none correlated with activity in canonical prefrontal emotion regulation circuits.
• The study challenges the assumption that these indices reflect a shared underlying regulatory capacity mediated by prefrontal areas, suggesting instead that they capture distinct components of emotion regulation influenced by different neural and behavioural processes.
• Task-based affective changes were associated with activity in emotion-generative regions like the amygdala and sensorimotor networks rather than prefrontal control regions, indicating reappraisal may modulate emotional salience and perception-action processes rather than top-down control.
• The lack of association between trait questionnaires and neural or task-based measures highlights a gap explained by differences in temporal stages of regulation and ecological validity, with real-world reappraisal involving selection and initiation processes not captured in standard fMRI tasks.
• The findings caution against interpreting individual differences in emotion regulation capacity from regional brain activations alone and call for methodological refinements, including connectivity and gradient-based approaches, to better align theoretical constructs, behavioural tasks, and neural measures in emotion regulation research.