Is emotion regulation self-regulation?

Ochsner and Gross [1] suggest two different neural systems to be involved in emotion regulation. The first system concerns ventral and orbital prefrontal cortical regions accounting for context-dependent evaluation of the value of emotional stimuli as required in stimulus– reward reversal learning and extinction. The second system involves the dorsal prefrontal cortex that allows for explicit reasoning about stimuli–emotion associations. Recent imaging studies show that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (PACC), and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) are also involved in relating emotional stimuli to the self. Phan et al. [2] observed that the degree of emotional self-relatedness (as obtained in subjective ratings) was associated with signal changes in VMPFC, PACC and DMPFC: The more self-related the picture content was appraised by the subject, the more activation was observed in these regions. In another study [3], signal changes in DMPFC were related to positive and negative emotional personality trait adjectives. This is in line with an earlier study by Gusnard et al. [4] where self-related (i.e. internal) attention to emotional stimuli induced signal changes in PACC, VMPFC and DMPFC when compared with non-self-related (i.e. external) attention. Finally, Ochsner et al. [5] observed increased recruitment in PACC during self-referent emotional contents (selffocus) as compared with situational context meanings (situation-focus). Although this is shown in their review in Figure 3c it is not discussed. This suggests an overlap between self-relatedness and emotion regulation in anterior cortical midline regions. Is self-referential processing one way to regulate emotion? One could, for example, imagine that the degree of selfrelatedness controls the subjective experience of emotion, that is, feelings. The more activation in VMPFC, the more