Executive Functions: A Neuropsychological Understanding of Self-Regulation

Abstract

This article explores self-regulation, a key concept in Gestalt therapy, as a neuropsychological process and a function of the frontal lobes and pre-frontal cortex. More specifically, it defines the executive functions as the higher cognitive capacities that support the processes of self-regulation. It presents emergence as a description of the way in which such higher cognition gives rise to the experience of self, with its higher level of integration, and in which self-regulation exhibits agency and the first-person perspective of subjective experience is identified as one's own.