Integrating Research on Self-Control across Multiple Levels of Analysis: Insights from Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Abstract

AbstractAdvances in neuroimaging methods and techniques and interest in understanding the neural bases of psychological phenomena are rapidly changing how the capacity for self-control is being addressed. An approach dubbed Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) integrates research across multiple levels of analysis, leading to important findings that link the basic social, cognitive, and affective processes underlying self-control to their neural substrates. This chapter illustrates how a SCAN approach can be useful for addressing questions including the problem of how to enable researchers from different areas with different types of expertise and interests in self-control to communicate with one another and most effectively use each other’s (sometimes highly technical) theories and methods. Towards this end, we begin by describing the basic goals of SCAN and some of the key challenges facing researchers who adopt this approach. We then describe how this approach is currently being used to build an integrative understanding of the processes underlying a particular type of self-control process that involves actively reinterpreting the meaning of an emotionally evocative stimulus to meet and/or modulate ones’ feelings. We conclude by discussing important future research directions in this area.