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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Aug 15.
Published in final edited form as: Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2012 Mar;1251:E1–24. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2012.06751.x

Figure 1.

Figure 1

A multi-level approach to building model of emotion regulation. A. In cognitive, affective and social neuroscience research we seek to describe phenomena in terms of relationships between three levels of analysis: experience and behavior, psychological processes and neural systems. The bidirectional arrows between levels indicate that the relationships among them are bidirectional. B. Through measurement and/or experimental manipulation, neuroimaging research on emotion regulation can observe phenomena at the behavioral level and the neural level and use these observations to infer the nature of the intervening cognitive and/or affective processes. The direction of the arrows from the behavioral and neural levels towards the process level indicates the direction of causal inference (i.e. we can't observe the operation of these processes directly, but infer their operation based on behavioral and neural observations).