How the Brain’s Control Systems Shape the Way We Manage Our Emotions

Why do some people calmly reframe a stressful situation while others bottle up their feelings until they spill over? A new study published in Trends in Psychology by researchers at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil offers one of the most detailed answers yet, and its findings are more surprising than most intuition would suggest. Renata Mascarenhas Aleixo Reis and her colleagues set out to map the relationships between three of the mind’s most important self-regulation systems: executive functions, metacognition, and emotion regulation. Their results, drawn from 246 typical adults aged between 18 and 55, reveal that these systems are far more independent than many psychologists have assumed, and that specific subcomponents of each one predict very different emotional strategies.

Executive functions are the brain’s general-purpose control toolkit, housed largely in the prefrontal cortex. They include inhibitory control, the ability to suppress automatic responses; cognitive flexibility, the capacity to shift between tasks or perspectives; and working memory and attentional processes that keep goals in mind while distractions compete for space. Metacognition, by contrast, is often described as thinking about thinking. It covers the monitoring and control of one’s own mental states, including awareness of thoughts and feelings and the strategies people use to manage them. Emotion regulation, the third player, refers to the processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience or express those emotions.

The theoretical reason to expect these systems to be linked is compelling. James Gross’s influential process model of emotion regulation holds that reappraisal, reinterpreting the meaning of an emotional event, depends on working memory and cognitive flexibility, while expressive suppression, clamping down on the outward signs of emotion, plausibly depends on inhibitory control. Philip Zelazo and William Cunningham have similarly argued that executive function is the mechanism underlying emotion regulation itself. Meanwhile, researchers such as Claudia Roebers have proposed unifying frameworks in which executive function and metacognition form a single continuum of cognitive self-regulation, and studies in children have repeatedly found longitudinal associations between the two. If the developing brain wires these systems together, one might expect them to travel together in healthy adults as well.

To test these ideas, the Brazilian team individually assessed each participant using a carefully chosen battery of instruments. Executive functions were measured with the Five Digit Test, a Stroop-like task that isolates different components of cognitive control, including reading automaticity, selective attention, inhibitory control, and flexibility. Metacognition was assessed with the Metacognition Scale of Thoughts and Feelings, an instrument the same group had previously constructed and validated to capture how people monitor and regulate their own thoughts and emotional states. Emotion regulation was measured with the Questionnaire of Emotional Regulation, adapted for the Brazilian population, which taps strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, suppression, and redirection of attentional focus. Because each participant was evaluated individually rather than through mass online questionnaires, the quality of the cognitive data is notably higher than in many correlational studies in this field.

The statistical analysis was deliberately robust. The researchers used the Mann-Whitney test to compare groups, Spearman correlations to probe monotonic relationships between the main constructs, and regression analysis to ask which specific subcomponents predicted which specific regulation strategies. This subcomponent-level approach is the study’s real innovation. Rather than collapsing executive function into a single score and metacognition into another, the team treated each construct as a family of distinct abilities, then asked which family members did the predictive work. That granularity matters, because aggregate scores can mask relationships that only appear when the right components are paired together.

The first headline finding is a genuine null result: executive functions and metacognition showed no correlation at all in this adult sample. For anyone steeped in the developmental literature, this is striking. In children, executive function and metacognitive monitoring appear to develop hand in hand, and several theoretical frameworks treat them as two faces of the same self-regulatory coin. The Bahia results suggest that whatever coupling exists early in life may loosen by adulthood, or that the two constructs, when measured with performance-based tasks versus self-report scales, capture genuinely separable dimensions of mental life. The finding echoes a long-standing methodological debate about whether performance measures and ratings of executive function assess the same underlying construct at all.

The second set of findings concerns how these systems feed into emotion regulation, and here the picture becomes beautifully specific. Cognitive flexibility predicted higher scores on attentional redirection, which makes intuitive sense: the ability to shift perspectives is exactly what allows a person to move their attention away from an upsetting stimulus and toward something more neutral or constructive. Inhibitory control, meanwhile, predicted higher suppression, the strategy of holding emotional expressions in check. This mapping is theoretically satisfying, because suppression is essentially an act of response inhibition applied to emotional behavior. The classic demonstration of this link comes from studies showing that people with stronger inhibitory control are better at keeping thoughts better left unsaid from becoming words actually spoken.

Metacognition told a different story. Metacognitive factors predicted cognitive reappraisal and the redirection of focus, two strategies that involve changing how one relates to an emotional situation rather than simply clamping down on its expression. This fits a growing body of work on decentering, the metacognitive capacity to observe thoughts and feelings as transient mental events rather than literal truths. Researchers modeling decentering have argued that metacognitive monitoring is what allows a person to step back from an emotion and reframe it, and clinical approaches such as metacognitive therapy build directly on the idea that beliefs about one’s own cognition regulate emotional distress. The new data provide correlational support for that framework in a typical, non-clinical population.

The practical implications ripple outward in several directions. For education, the results suggest that training programs targeting flexibility might bolster students’ capacity to redirect attention away from academic anxiety, while metacognitive training could strengthen reappraisal skills that protect well-being. For clinical psychology, the finding that distinct executive and metacognitive components predict distinct regulation strategies hints at more precise intervention targets: rather than treating emotion dysregulation as a single problem, therapists might assess which specific upstream ability is weak and tailor treatment accordingly. For everyday readers, the study is a reminder that emotional style is not a fixed personality trait but the downstream product of measurable cognitive machinery, machinery that varies from person to person and can, in principle, be exercised.

The authors are careful about the limits of their design. The sample was recruited through snowball sampling, a method that can skew toward particular social networks, and the mean age of roughly 24 years means the oldest adults in the 18-to-55 range were underrepresented. Correlational and regression analyses cannot establish causal direction: it remains possible that habitual use of certain regulation strategies shapes executive and metacognitive abilities over time, rather than the other way around, or that both are shaped by a third factor such as education or socioeconomic background. Self-report measures of emotion regulation also carry well-known biases, since people are not always accurate reporters of their own strategies. Still, by showing that the architecture of self-regulation is more modular than unified, and by pinpointing exactly which components predict which strategies, the study gives researchers a sharper map of the mind’s emotional control system, and a compelling reason to stop treating executive function, metacognition, and emotion regulation as one undifferentiated blob.

Subject of Research: The relationships between executive functions, metacognition, and emotion regulation strategies in healthy adults

Article Title: Correlation Between Executive Functions, Metacognition, and Emotional Regulation in Typical Adults

Article References: Reis, R. M. A., dos Santos Aragão, E. W., da Conceição, J. R. B., & Abreu, J. N. S. (2025). Correlation Between Executive Functions, Metacognition, and Emotional Regulation in Typical Adults. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00494-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00494-4

Keywords: executive functions, metacognition, emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, cognitive reappraisal, suppression, attentional redirection, prefrontal cortex, self-regulation, cognitive psychology, Trends in Psychology