Disturbances of emotion regulation are a hallmark of multiple psychiatric disorders 3, 4, 5 and emotion control has recently been identified as the component of self-control that is most predictive of mental health 6. Being able to experience different emotional states and if necessary, adaptively regulate emotional reactions, are core aspects of daily human lives 1, 2. Self-control skills enable individuals to align their behaviour with own long-term goals and values. These results suggest that a common arousal-based facilitation mechanism may support an individual’s self-control across domains. Participants who harnessed more regulation-associated arousal during emotion regulation were also more successful in choosing healthier foods. Moreover, the extent of this individual regulatory arousal boost predicted performance in another self-control task, dietary health challenges. Pupil diameter increase during regulation predicted individual differences in emotion regulation success beyond task difficulty. We employed an emotion regulation paradigm with a combination of design features that allowed us to dissociate regulation from emotional arousal in the pupil diameter time course of 34 healthy adults. Pupil diameter is a proxy to infer upon the central arousal state. However, the role of the arousal system in emotion regulation is less well understood. Multiple theories have proposed that increasing central arousal through the brain’s locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system may facilitate cognitive control and memory.
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