Younger, Aron, Parke, Chatterjee, & Mackey, 2010). It is possible that self-affirmation
relies on similar neural mechanisms to reduce threat responding. In the present article, self-affirmation(vs. control) led to greater VS activity, which could correspond with activation decreases in neural threat regions during subsequent tasks. In turn, this could contribute to the array of threat reduction benefits that selfaffirmation has been shown to foster. Future studies should assess whether this proposed reward-system
mechanism underlies the stress-buffering effects shown in previous self-affirmation studies.