Neurophysiological Markers for Child Emotion Regulation From the Perspective of Emotion-Cognition Integration: Current Directions and Future Challenges

Neuroscientific research on emotion regulation suggests that the interplay between emotion and cognition may be fundamental to the ability to adaptively regulate emotions. Although emotion and cognition have historically been considered to be in opposition, more recent research suggests that they are also integrated, coordinated, and complementary. In this article, I review studies showing that scalp-recorded event related potentials (ERPs) reflecting emotion-cognition integration can be used as clinically meaningful indices of emotion regulation in children and adults, and have the potential to serve as biomarkers for emotion regulation and risk for specific affective disorders. Drawing on neuroscience and behavioral research, I propose a model in which ERP measures of emotion-cognition integration rather than opposition is the guiding principle for detecting neural markers for emotion regulation. Suggestions for a future research agenda are then presented.