Abstract: This review compares the cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression strategies with respect to their effects on emotional responses and their neural underpinnings. Cognitive reappraisal not only reduces subjective emotion experience but also decreases the sympathetic responses and deactivates the emotion-related brain such as amygdala and medial orbitofrontal cortex, while expressive suppression leads to sympathetic and medial orbitofrontal cortex activations. Although cognitive reappraisal is more effective than expressive suppression in daily life, and better for people’s physical and mental health, repressor behavior can be a pragmatic form of coping that helps people deal effectively with extremely aversive events. What’s more, in this paper the author presents that conduct the research on the aspect of unawareness, develop the researching paradigm, expand the researching range and conduct the research from the view of educational neuroscience, all of these may be the researching trends of emotion regulation strategies and its neural basis.

Key words: cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, emotion regulation, neural mechanism, educational neuroscience