This week’s guest speaker in the SWE Colloquium is Silvia Maier, University of Zurich, Department of Economics and Translational Neuromodeling Unit, ETH & University of Zurich.

Individual differences in neural and psychophysiological characteristics during self-regulation

Individuals vary profoundly in their ability to use self-control. This variability in behavior is accompanied by differences in brain activity and other physiological functions both at rest and during self-control challenges. In a set of studies, we identified neural responses in the dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices that covaried with individual differences in realized self-control. In our initial work, we replicated the finding that connectivity between the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with better self-control in dietary choices and show how this mechanism is impaired by stress (Maier et al. 2015 Neuron). We also showed that individual differences in resting heart rate variability (HRV) improved the prediction of self-control levels, suggesting that HRV may be a useful biomarker for self-regulatory abilities (Maier & Hare 2017 J Neurosci). Furthermore, we found that neural signatures accompanying successful emotion-regulation correlate with self-control success in a separate dietary choice task. Our results suggest that individual differences in the flexibility of the neural system to reinterpret choice situations or emotional content are related to self-regulatory success across domains (Maier & Hare 2019 bioRxiv). Taken together, our results support a role for prefrontal networks in flexibly adjusting behavior to meet self-regulation goals.