Jackson Jima

A person who manages their emotions well is supposed to show it in the brain, usually as stronger prefrontal activity reining in the amygdala. That assumption runs through proposals for therapy biomarkers and neurofeedback, and through a good part of educational neuroscience. Sicorello and colleagues in the NIDER Consortium, 32 research teams pooling their scans, tested it at a scale the field had never reached, with 2,175 adults across 40 fMRI datasets. Participants reinterpreted negative images to soften what they felt, the classic reappraisal task. The consortium measured each person’s regulation capacity three ways, by questionnaire, by how much their ratings of the images dropped, and by how much their amygdala quieted, and then asked whether brain activity during the task tracked any of them. The three measures barely agreed with each other, which is a finding on its own. Questionnaire scores showed no relation to activity in the regulation network. The few associations that did appear were small and sat outside the expected regions, one depended heavily on a single study, and another was inseparable from how strongly a person’s whole brain responded. The authors conclude that individual differences in these scans should not be used to infer how well a person regulates emotion. The study covers healthy adults, and the questionnaires capture how often people use reappraisal rather than how well they do it, which the authors acknowledge. What the result rules out is narrower and still consequential. Whatever emotion regulation capacity is, a reappraisal scan does not read it out. Fig. 2 from Sicorello et al. (2026), Nature. CC BY 4.0.