Commentary: The Neural Bases of Emotion Regulation

Amit Etkin, Christian Büchel, and James Gross make a valuable contribution in their article " The neural bases of emotion regulation " in the November 2015 issue of Nature reviews: Neuroscience (Etkin et al., 2015). Their review article concludes a process of gradual elevation of implicit emotion regulation to an equal footing with explicit emotion regulation. Whereas, explicit processes of emotion regulation refers to those that demand conscious, effortful application, implicit refers to those that proceed automatically and unconsciously. In this commentary, I suggest that the increased recognition and neural definition of implicit emotion regulation processes offers a unique opportunity for psychodynamic psychotherapy. The postulated equivalence of defense mechanisms with implicit emotion regulation (Rice and Hoffman, 2014) extends an opportunity to ground a key psychodynamic construct in defined neural correlates. Etkin and colleagues' article is not the first time that the implicit emotion regulation construct has been identified. In a 2011 article Etkin's group introduced " two theoretical and empirical spheres that organize different areas of emotion regulation and label these as 'explicit' and 'implicit " ' (Gyurak et al., 2011). The authors note that there was some precedent to this organization in the work of Bargh and Williams' conceptualizations of effortful and automatic processes (Bargh and Williams, 2007), a work preceded by Bargh's early interests in automaticity in social cognition (Bargh, 1994). The organization of Bargh and Williams' work parallels those of Susan Andersen and others, where the study of transference phenomenon and other unconscious processes developed a valuable scientific base to key psychodynamic principles (Berk and Andersen, 2000; Andersen and Przybylinski, 2012). The explicit-implicit distinction offers a similar opportunity for the psychodynamic construct of defense mechanisms. Gross notes that past studies of emotion regulation include Freud's studies of how people unconsciously defend against anxiety-inducing impulses (Gross, 2013). Etkin and colleagues' valuation of implicit process emphasizes these unconscious processes as central to the field of neurobiological study of emotion regulation. The distinction between ventromedially-mediated implicit processes and more dorsolaterally-mediated explicit processes in the prefrontal cortex offers a means to observe these distinct unconscious processes. Because implicit emotion regulation is postulated to be equivalent to defense mechanisms (Rice and Hoffman, 2014), a key psychodynamic construct gains a neural signature and a valuable place in the study of the affective neurosciences. Establishing brain-based, neurobiological correlates to traditionally psychological constructs advances the goals of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project (Insel et …