Functional imaging studies have begun to examine the neural bases of the ability to down-regulate or decrease emotion, which plays a central role in both normal and abnormal emotion regulation. The ability to up-regulate, or increase, emotional responses has yet to be investigated, even though it may play an essential regulatory role as well. Prior work in our lab has shown that a cognitive form of emotion regulation, known as reappraisal, can be used to decrease emotional responses and involves modulation of regions implicated in emotion processing by regions of lateral prefrontal cortex generally implicated in cognitive control (SFN abstract V V-62, 2001). In the present study, we sought to extend these findings by comparing the use of reappraisal to increase emotion to the use of reappraisal to decrease emotion. Participants were asked to reappraise photos by either increasing or decreasing their self-involvement with events depicted in emotionally arousing photos. The goals were to determine a) whether...