Regulation of emotion in major depressive disorder.

The ability to regulate emotion is central to everyday functioning, and has been studied extensively in healthy adults in the last two decades. One conclusion supported by this research is that various cognitive strategies can be used to effectively regulate both positive and negative emotion (which is consistent with a wealth of clinical work on the efficacy of cognitive therapy). More recently, basic neuroimaging work using now-well-established experimental paradigms has increased our understanding of the neural systems involved in the cognitive regulation of emotion. The majority of this research has focused on a specific cognitive regulation strategy known as reappraisal, which involves reinterpreting the meaning of stimuli in ways that alter one's affective responses to them. Taken together, over 35 neuroimaging studies of reappraisal in healthy adults published in the past 9 years have highlighted the interaction between subcortical systems thought to generate emotion and prefrontal systems thought to implement various kinds of cognitive control processes (for reviews see (1, 2)).