Emily M. Drabant, Kateri McRae, Stephen B. Manuck, Ahmad R. Hariri, and James  J. Gross

Background: Participants who are instructed to use reappraisal to  downregulate negative emotion show decreased amygdala responses and increased  prefrontal responses. However, it is not known whether individual differences in  the tendency to use reappraisal manifests in similar neural responses when  individuals are spontaneously confronted with negative situations. Such  spontaneous emotion regulation might play an important role in normal and  pathological responses to the emotional challenges of everyday  life.
Methods:Fifty-six healthy women completed a blood oxygenation-level  dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging challenge paradigm involving the  perceptual processing of emotionally negative facial expressions. Participants  also completed measures of typical emotion regulation use, trait anxiety, and  neuroticism.
Results: Greater use of reappraisal in everyday life was related  to decreased amygdala activity and increased prefrontal and parietal activity  during the processing of negative emotional facial expressions. These  associations were not attributable to variation in trait anxiety, neuroticism,  or the use of another common form of emotion regulation, namely  suppression.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that, like instructed  reappraisal, individual differences in reappraisal use are associated with  decreasedactivation in ventral emotion generative regions and increased  activation in prefrontal control regions in response to negative
stimuli.  Such individual differences in emotion regulation might predict successful  coping with emotional challenges as well as the onset of
affective  disorders.