IntroductionEmotions are proposed to involve a "person-situation interaction that engages attention, has meaning to an individual, and causes a coordinated yet malleable multisystem response to the interaction," 1 including a subjectively experienced feeling component.2 Emotion regulation refers to processes that alter the nature, magnitude and duration of these multisystem responses and feelings.3 Once placed in an emotion-evoking situation, an individual can deploy attentional mechanisms for emotion regulation (e.g., through distraction or concentration) or use "cognitive reappraisal," whereby he or she modifies the situation's emotional importance by reinterpreting the outcomes and actions of the situation itself (situation-focused reappraisal) or by altering the situation's personal relevance (self-focused reappraisal).Emotion regulation by self-focused reappraisal has proven effective in decreasing negative emotional experience 4 and alter ing physiologic responses in both the central 3,5 and the auto nomic nervous system. Background: In healthy individuals, voluntary modification of self-relevance has proven effective in regulating subjective emotional experience as well as physiologic responses evoked by emotive stimuli. As social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by both altered emotional and self-related processing, we tested if emotion regulation through self-focused reappraisal is effective in individuals with SAD. Methods: While undergoing 3 T functional magnetic resonance imaging, individuals with SAD and matched healthy controls either passively viewed neutral and aversive pictures or actively increased or decreased their negative emotional experience through the modification of selfrelevance or personal distance to aversive pictures. Participants rated all pictures with regard to the intensity of elicited emotions and selfrelatedness. Results: We included 21 individuals with SAD and 23 controls in our study. Individuals with SAD reported significantly stronger emotional intensity across conditions and showed a nonsignificant tendency to judge pictures as more self-related than controls. Compared with controls, individuals with SAD showed an overactivation in bilateral temporoparietal regions and in the posterior midcingulate cortex during the passive viewing of aversive compared with neutral pictures. During instructed emotion regulation, activation patterns normalized and no significant group differences were detected. Limitations: As no positive pictures were presented, results might be limited to the regu lation of negative emotion. Conclusion: During passive viewing of aversive images, individuals with SAD showed evidence of neural hyperreactivity that may be interpreted as increased bodily self-consciousness and heightened perspective-taking. During voluntary increase and decrease of negative emotional intensity, group differences disappeared, suggesting self-focused reappraisal as a successful emotion regulation strategy for individuals with SAD.