Self-Regulation and Self-Regulation Failure

Self-regulation refers to the ability of people to make plans, choose from alternatives, control impulses, and regulate behavior (Heatherton, 2011). Those who are better able to selfregulate enjoy success in many aspects of social life, such as improved relationships and increased job success (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004), whereas failures of self-regulation are a leading cause of many health problems, such as obesity (Calle, Rodriguez, WalkerThurmond, & Thun, 2003; Mela, 2001) and tobacco use (Shmueli & Prochaska, 2009). Research in social and personality psychology has long explored how people differ in selfcontrol capacity (e.g., Mischel et al., 2011), as well as situational factors that support (or disrupt) self-regulatory processes; however, it is only recently that researchers in the cognitive neurosciences have begun to examine the neural mechanisms that underlie different forms of self-regulation and selfregulation failure (for reviews, see Cohen & Lieberman, 2010; Heatherton &Wagner, 2011; Somerville, Jones, & Casey, 2010). Findings from this body of work suggest that effective selfregulation, particularly within the domain of impulse control, relies upon a balance between brain regions involved in representing the rewarding or emotional value of a given temptation or situation (e.g., the ventral striatum and amygdala) and regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) that are implicated in top-down control. Many of these findings have emerged from investigations of the regulation of appetitive desires (e.g., food and drug cravings), emotions (e.g., regulation of negative affect), and thoughts (e.g., suppression of stereotypes and unwanted thoughts). Here, we summarize research on the neural systems involved in self-regulation and its failure by focusing on three of the most common ways in which self-regulatory capacity can become impaired, namely, (1) exposure to tempting cues (e.g., fattening food), (2) emotional and social distress, and (3) depletion of limited self-regulatory resources.