The Neural Basis of Explicit and Implicit Emotion Regulation: A Coordinate-Based Meta-Analysis

Background: Emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic factor in psychopathology. However, the field is primarily dominated by research in explicit emotion regulation. Understanding of implicit emotion regulation as well as its relationship with explicit emotion regulation is limited. Here, we investigate whether explicit and implicit emotion regulation exist on a continuum of the explicitness of the emotion regulation goal at the neural level.Method: We conducted a coordinate-based neuroimaging meta-analysis with activation likelihood estimation. We focused on neuroimaging studies that investigate explicit (i.e., reappraisal, suppression, distraction, selective attention, psychological placebo) and implicit emotion regulation strategies (i.e., extinction, affect labelling, emotional go/no-go, emotional stroop) in either healthy individuals or individuals with mood and/or anxiety disorders.Results: There were more studies of explicit emotion regulation (75 experiments, 2811 participants) than implicit emotion regulation (28 experiments, 1292 participants). Results of the neuroimaging meta-analysis revealed that explicit emotion regulation strategies recruit more frontal and temporal lobe compared to implicit emotion regulation. Implicit emotion regulation strategies recruit more subcortical and limbic areas compared to explicit emotion regulation strategies. Insula, inferior frontal gyrus and extra-nuclear in the subcortical area are responsible for both explicit and implicit emotion regulation. Conclusion: Explicit and implicit emotion regulation are associated with different neural correlates. Explicit emotion regulation recruits more regions responsible for goal-directed behaviors while implicit emotion regulation targets regions related to emotion and affect processing, instead of goal-awareness. Pre-registration: This study was pre-registered on PROSPERO (CRD42024505144).