Every day, without noticing, you shape how you feel. You talk yourself down from anger, stretch out a good moment, steady your nerves before something hard. Often you don't do it alone — a friend's message, a shared laugh, someone simply listening can turn a feeling around. Your surroundings do their quiet part too: a crowded street winds you up, a walk among trees settles you. And underneath it all, your body sets the terms — a poor night's sleep, a wave of stress, the hormonal tides across a month all change what you can manage. This everyday, many-layered act of regulating emotion is one of the most consequential things a human brain does.

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When it works, it protects our health, our relationships, and our sense of who we are. When it falters, it lies at the core of anxiety, depression, and much of human suffering. At the Affective Neuro Lab we want to understand how the brain makes emotion regulation possible — alone and with others, in the body and in the world — and how to help when it breaks down.

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The Affective Neuro Lab, located in the Department of Psychology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, is dedicated to exploring the many facets of human emotions. Our overarching goals are to enhance emotion regulation, build emotional resilience, and ultimately improve well-being through our research and innovative approaches.Bridging brain imaging, physiology, real-world data, and computational modelling, we follow emotion from neural circuits to lived experience, and turn what we learn into neurally informed tools for prevention and intervention. The lab is one of five working groups of the Brain Imaging Unit (BIU) at the University of Innsbruck, and contributes to the Research Centre Health and Prevention across the Lifespan and Doctoral College Biopsychosocial Aspects of Health and Prevention.​