The neuroscience of emotion regulation development: implications for education

•Emotion regulation serves to modify the nature, intensity or duration of emotions.•Prefrontal cortex may modulate subcortical structures when regulating emotion.•Regulation of positive and negative emotions has different developmental courses.•Prefrontal cortex development may improve regulation of negative emotions.•Caregivers can help children better regulate emotions.

Emotion regulation is a critical life skill that can facilitate learning and improve educational outcomes. Developmental studies find that the ability to regulate emotion improves with age. In neuroimaging studies, emotion regulation abilities are associated with recruitment of a set of prefrontal brain regions involved in cognitive control and executive functioning that mature late in development. In this review we discuss the regulation of both negative and positive emotions, the role of other people in guiding our emotional responses, and the potential applications of this work to education.