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Brain Networks of Regulation

How does a thought change a feeling? Picture getting cut off in traffic: your pulse jumps and anger flares — then you tell yourself the other driver might be rushing to a hospital, and the heat drains away. In that instant, regions scattered across your brain — prefrontal control areas, the amygdala, and the pathways linking them — have worked together to reinterpret an emotion.

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This research area maps those networks and, increasingly, learns to read them. Using multivariate pattern analysis and decoding, we try to recover from brain activity alone which strategy someone is using — reframing a situation, or simply looking away — and how well it is working.

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One question keeps pulling us back: why does this come so easily to some people and fail others? We treat that variation not as noise to average out, but as the signal itself. If we can pin down which brain systems predict who regulates well, we've found the levers a future therapy might actually move.

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Projects

  • Decoding affective control (DEACON) (PAT 9803824), Austrian Science Fund (FWF), 2025 - 2028 (active)

  • Functional networks underlying emotion processing (795994), MARIE SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE ACTIONS (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015), 2018-2020 (completed)

 

Team

Carmen Morawetz (PI), Laura Gervais (DEACON)

 

Key publications

  1. Maurizio Sicorello, Jenny Zaehringer, ..., (2025). The elusive signature of emotion regulation capabilities: Evidence from a large-scale consortium. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.18.670843

  2. Wang, R., Bas. L., Janet, R., Smallwood, J., Xu, Y., Tusche, A. Patterns of Ongoing Thought Are Associated With Emotion Regulation and Negative Affect in Daily Life (2026). Affective Science (7): 2013-231. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-026-00355-y

  3. Morawetz, C., Hajrić, M., Rammensee, R.A., Berboth, S., Basten, U. (2025) Wired to regulate: Brain connectivity predicts emotion regulation capacity and tendency. Human Brain Mapping, Nov;46(16):e70400. doi: 10.1002/hbm.70400

  4. Morawetz, C. & Basten, U. (2024). Neural underpinnings of individual differences in emotion regulation: a systematic review. Neuroscience and Biobhavioral Reviews, doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105727. 

  5. Morawetz, C., Riedel, M.C., Salo, T., Berboth, S., Eickhoff, S.B., Laird, A., Kohn, N. (2020). Multiple large-scale networks underlying emotion regulation. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. Sep;116:382-395. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.07.001

  6. Morawetz, C., Bode, S., Derntl, B., Heekeren, H.R. (2017). The effect of strategies, goals and stimulus material on the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation: A meta-analysis of MRI studies. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Jan 72: 111-128. DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.11.014

Funded by

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©2026 Affective Neuro Lab

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