Abstract
Self-regulation enables individuals to guide their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a purposeful manner. Self-regulation is thus crucial for goal-directed behavior and contributes to many consequential outcomes in life including physical health, psychological well-being, ethical decision making, and strong interpersonal relationships. Neuroscientific research has revealed that the prefrontal cortex plays a central role in self-regulation, specifically by exerting top-down control over subcortical regions involved in reward (e.g., striatum) and emotion (e.g., amygdala). To orient readers, we first offer a methodological overview of tDCS and then review experiments using non-invasive brain stimulation techniques (especially transcranial direct current stimulation) to target prefrontal brain regions implicated in self-regulation. We focus on brain stimulation studies of self-regulatory behavior across three broad domains of response: persistence, delay behavior, and impulse control. We suggest that stimulating the prefrontal cortex promotes successful self-regulation by altering the balance in activity between the prefrontal cortex and subcortical regions involved in emotion and reward processing.
Highlights
At least since Walter Mischel’s seminal work on delay of gratification (Mischel, 1958; Mischel et al, 1972), the practical and the theoretical implications of self-regulation have been important topics of study in psychological science (Carver and Scheier, 1982; Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999; Muraven and Baumeister, 2000)
Self-regulation is crucial for goal-directed behavior and has been related to many consequential outcomes in life including physical and mental health, psychological well-being, ethical decision making, and strong interpersonal relationships
Because the direct manipulation of cortical excitability with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) produced the same outcome as the correlational finding reported HarmonJones et al (2009), this study suggests that tDCS over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex does modulate emotive responses associated with social exclusion and asymmetric frontal cortical activity
Summary
At least since Walter Mischel’s seminal work on delay of gratification (Mischel, 1958; Mischel et al, 1972), the practical and the theoretical implications of self-regulation have been important topics of study in psychological science (Carver and Scheier, 1982; Metcalfe and Mischel, 1999; Muraven and Baumeister, 2000). Children who were unsuccessful at delaying gratification showed preferential recruitment of the ventral striatum in a delay task as adults (Casey et al, 2011) These findings highlight the importance of the balance or relative activity levels in the prefrontal cortex and subcortical regions, respectively, and how shifts in this balance can tip the scales between short-term and long-term goal regulation. A form of emotion regulation that involves generating cool cognitive representations of affective states or changing the meaning of emotional events, is associated with increased activity in dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, alongside corresponding decreases limbic system (i.e., amygdala) activity Another relevant model of emotion regulation highlighted the key role of a cortico-subcortical network consisting in a dorsal system and a ventral system (Phillips, 2003; Phillips et al, 2008). We conclude our review by highlighting inconsistencies in findings, unresolved questions, and new directions for future research
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