Agent A (left, purple) is the person regulating their own reaction; Agent B (right, teal) is the counterpart in the conflict. A spark launched from the center hub represents a stressor reaching Agent A's amygdala (red node above the platform). The prefrontal cortex node (blue) recruits inhibitory control back onto the amygdala — how strongly depends on the chosen strategy and your regulation-skill slider. What Agent A visibly displays then spreads to Agent B through empathic contagion, and the combined arousal is the social-tension meter driving the connecting beam between the two platforms toward red (escalation) or green (resolution).
d(amygdala)/dt = trigger·intensity − inhibition·amygdala − decay·amygdala
inhibition = pfc · (strategy==reappraisal ? 1.0 : 0.35)
displayed = strategy==suppression ? 0.3·amygdala : amygdala
d(tensionB)/dt = empathy·displayed − decay·tensionB
- Reappraisal — cognitively reframes the trigger, so PFC control actually inhibits the amygdala signal itself; the most durable strategy (Gross, 1998; Greenberg fMRI: reappraisal ↓ amygdala, ↑ DLPFC).
- Suppression — masks the outward display but leaves the internal amygdala signal largely untouched, and accumulates a physiological "rebound cost" over time — matching its known rebound effect and higher long-term cost.
- Avoidance — sidesteps the trigger by cutting its effective frequency, avoiding the spike entirely but building no regulation skill for next time.
- Empathic contagion — how strongly Agent A's displayed emotion transfers to Agent B; higher values make an unregulated reaction more likely to escalate the whole interaction, not just Agent A's own state.
Real-world relevance: this is why the process model of emotion regulation (Gross) ranks reappraisal above suppression for social outcomes — suppression can look calm to the outside world while quietly raising physiological cost and doing nothing to defuse the conflict at its source.