Figure 1. The Social Regulation of Emotion.

(A) Unlike self-regulation, in which the regulator and the target are the same actor, the social regulation of emotion involves two separate people engaging in an iterative and dynamic cycle in which one’s actions shape the other’s responses. (B) This fundamental dissociation between agents has ramifications for the underlying neural circuitry involved. In self-regulation, systems supporting regulation and the emotion-generation systems they target reside in the same agent. In the social regulation of emotion, these processes reside in separate agents, with the control systems of the regulator responding to and acting on the emotion-generation system of the target. Importantly, this increased social complexity also places demands on relevant social cognitive systems. As a result, both parties engage mentalizing systems (depicted in green), and the regulators are more likely to mobilize regions of the action identification system (yellow) and systems for empathic sharing of the emotional states of others (orange). Abbreviations: ACC, anterior cingulate cortex; PFC, prefrontal cortex; TPJ, temporal–parietal junction.