Can Emotional Regulation Be Learned?

People who remain cool in emotionally charged situations are more likely to succeed personally and professionally, and inability to control emotional responses characterizes many forms of psychopathology. Because a frontoparietal circuit is involved in both emotional regulation and working memory, U.K. investigators studied whether training emotional working memory (eWM) improves cognitive control of affective responses (emotional regulation).

The 34 healthy participants were randomized to twenty 20-minute daily sessions of eWM training or placebo training. The eWM training presented picture-word pairs that were negative (e.g., fearful or angry expression, evil, hate) or neutral; subjects then were asked to identify whether the current pair …