Why can some people flexibly regulate their emotional reactions in stressful situations while others resort to rigid fight-or-flight responses? Effective emotion regulation in high-stress contexts is critical for successfully navigating many challenges in society, whether at the level of individuals, social groups, power dynamics, or politics. This is especially important for groups frequently exposed to stressful, often violent, encounters with far-reaching consequences. Improving emotion regulation in these at-risk groups holds promise to significantly enhance both individual well-being and societal safety. CONTEXT focuses on two groups at high risk due to their regular exposure to acute stress, that frequently face each other in direct confrontations: rule-breaking youth and rule-keeping police professionals. Although often cast as adversaries, these groups are essentially peers—young adults facing similar challenges during stressful confrontations. Current approaches to enhancing emotion regulation in such scenarios, however, remain inadequate. Existing theories overemphasize emotional downregulation. They moreover lack a mechanistic account of how physiological (autonomic nervous system) and neurocognitive (emotion regulation) changes interact during acute stress, limiting the ability to flexibly and contextually regulate emotions. Consequently, current interventions designed to improve emotion regulation are ineffective in high-stress situations. CONTEXT addresses these problems by bringing together a unique interdisciplinary consortium to: 1) develop a novel descriptive model of context-appropriate flexible emotion regulation in stressful situations, 2) uncover the interactions between the central and autonomic nervous systems that drive emotion regulation and individual differences in aggression during acute stress, and 3) leverage groundbreaking innovative techniques to develop a neurobiologically grounded, contextualized, gamified, and scalable dual-loop biofeedback training. This training will be co-designed with both police professionals and at-risk youth to help them manage their emotions when it matters most. Ultimately, CONTEXT aims to reduce stress, improve mental health, enhance professional performance, decrease youth aggression and recidivism, and foster stronger social connections.
