The neuroscience of emotion regulation development: implications for education

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Highlights

  • Emotion regulation serves to modify the nature, intensity or duration of emotions.

  • Prefrontal cortex may modulate subcortical structures when regulating emotion.

  • Regulation of positive and negative emotions has different developmental courses.

  • Prefrontal cortex development may improve regulation of negative emotions.

  • Caregivers can help children better regulate emotions.

Emotion regulation is a critical life skill that can facilitate learning and improve educational outcomes. Developmental studies find that the ability to regulate emotion improves with age. In neuroimaging studies, emotion regulation abilities are associated with recruitment of a set of prefrontal brain regions involved in cognitive control and executive functioning that mature late in development. In this review we discuss the regulation of both negative and positive emotions, the role of other people in guiding our emotional responses, and the potential applications of this work to education.

Introduction

How a student feels can profoundly shape how he or she thinks. For example, emotions can promote learning by capturing and holding attention as well as deepening encoding [1, 2, 3]. But they can also inhibit learning by blocking these cognitive processes in the face of threat [1, 4]. Thus, what emotions are elicited and whether a student can adaptively manage those emotions can have a strong impact on his or her learning. Given the multiple important roles emotion can play in educational contexts, it is essential that we understand how to promote and maintain emotional states that foster optimal learning. The capacity to regulate emotion may be key in this regard. Emotion regulation involves active attempts to maintain or change emotions and is a critical life skill that predicts positive life outcomes in adulthood [5, 6]. The ability to regulate one's emotions can serve many purposes: it can both increase emotional arousal or positive valence to enhance learning, and it can help to dampen emotional responses that might be blocking successful encoding of new information. Here we discuss how the neural systems underlying emotion regulation develop and consider their educational implications.

Section snippets

Neural mechanisms supporting emotion regulation

While there are many strategies that can be used to actively regulate one's emotions (for review see [7], McRae this volume), in brain imaging studies the most commonly studied strategy is reappraisal [8], which involves deliberately changing the way one thinks about the meaning of an emotionally evocative stimulus or situation. There has been increasing interest in the distinction between explicit forms of emotion regulation, like reappraisal, where one has an active goal of regulating and

Development of the neural systems supporting emotion regulation

While neuroscience research on emotion regulation in adults has exploded over the past 10–15 years, developmental research has emerged only more recently. A popular theory is that prefrontal control regions like dlPFC and vlPFC mature at a slower rate relative to affective response regions like the amygdala and ventral striatum [17, 18]. This imbalance is represented by a pattern of stronger activations in subcortical relative to cortical regions peaking during adolescence, which may contribute

Regulation of negative emotions across development

To date, only a handful of studies have examined the ability to regulate negative emotion in children as compared to adults. From these few studies, however, two kinds of key findings emerge. The first concern a child's ability to engage prefrontal systems to decrease a current emotion. Data suggest that the behavioral ability to down-regulate negative emotion, decrease amygdala activation [24] and increase activity in lateral prefrontal regions tracks with age [25, 26]. Amygdala-prefrontal

Regulation of positive emotions across development

Another critical, yet less explored, area of research concerns the regulation of positive emotions. While negative emotions are thought to focus attention on and promote encoding of potential threats, positive emotions are believed to broaden one's attentional scope which can then facilitate enhanced learning and memory [36]. While developmental neuroimaging studies testing this hypothesis have yet to be done, there is a related literature on how children and adolescents respond to rewards. The

The social regulation of emotion

Although our emotions are experienced individually, any parent or teacher knows that they can be heavily influenced by the words and actions of other people. Such social forms of regulation  which clearly are important  have seen little neuroscience research, although interest in them is growing (see, e.g. Reeck et al., 2016, and [38]) and related research on the interaction of social cognition and emotion during development is increasing [23, 45]. While to date, there are no imaging studies

Discussion

Because emotions can enhance or impede learning, the ability to regulate one's own and others’ emotions can facilitate successful educational outcomes. Emotion regulation is a type of emotion–cognition interaction where cognitive control systems are believed to aid in dampening or enhancing negative and positive emotions (Figure 1). Since brain regions associated with cognitive control structures  such as prefrontal cortex  may have a slower maturational trajectory relative to structures

Funding

This work was supported by the (R01 HD0691780, R01 AG043463, F31 MH107119).

Conflict of interest

Nothing declared.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Daphna Shohamy, Jennifer Silvers, and members of the SCAN Lab at Columbia for thoughtful discussion on the manuscript.

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