The Neural Basis of Emotion Regulation: A Review of Prefrontal-Limbic Mechanisms and Their Implications for Psychotherapy

Emotion regulation involves the strategies by which people adjust the strength, time course, or display of emotional responses. This review integrates psychological theory, functional neuroimaging, meta-analytic evidence, and intervention studies to characterize the neurocognitive basis for emotion regulation,which emerges from dynamic interactions among distributed brain networks. Regulation depends on context-sensitive activity in the amygdala, insula, and cingulate cortex during emotion generation, whereas intentional control engages lateral and medial prefrontal regions that maintain goals, interpret events, and shift attention or meaning. Effective regulation therefore relies on information integration rather than the inhibition of one brain region by another. Depression and anxiety involve maladaptive regulation patterns and ineffective prefrontal-limbic interaction, although these alterations are heterogeneous and non-specific to particular diagnoses. Cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, and mindfulness-based interventions may alter appraisals, salience, self-referential processing, and neural connectivity. However, small samples, heterogeneous tasks, and the correlational nature of functional imaging constrain causal and clinical inference. Future work should adopt integrated, longitudinal, multimodal, and ecologically valid designs to identify individual-level predictors of treatment outcomel.