Kevin N. Ochsner and James J. Gross
The capacity to control emotion is  important for human adaptation. Questions about t he neural bases of
emotion  regulation have recently taken on new importance, as functional imaging studies  in humans have
permitted direct investigation of control strategies that draw  upon higher cognitive processes difficult to study
in nonhumans. Such studies  have examined (1) controlling attention to, and (2) cognitively changing  the
meaning of, emotionally evocative stimuli. These two forms of emotion  regulation depend upon interactions
between prefrontal and cingulate control  systems and cortical and subcortical emotion-generative systems.
Taken  together, the results suggest a functional architecture for the cognitive  control of emotion that dove-
tails with findings from other human and  nonhuman research on emotion.