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all Reviewrelationships, increased job success and better mental health [7,8] and are less at risk of developing alcohol abuse problems or engaging in risky sexual behavior [9]. An understanding of the circumstances under which people fail at self-regulation – as well as the brain mechanisms associated with those failures – can provide valuable insights into how people regulate and control their thoughts, behaviors and emotions. Self-regulation failure The modern world holds many temptations. Every day, people need to resist fattening foods, avoid browsing the internet when they should be working, keep from snapping ed to escape from these unpleasant feelings by constricting their cognitive attention to the immediate situation while ignoring the long-term implications and higher-level sig-nificance of their current actions. This escape fromaversive self-awareness not only helps dieters to forget their un-pleasant views of self, but also disengages long-term plan-ning andmeaningful thinking and weakens the inhibitions that normally restrain a dieter’s food intake. This might explain, in part, the lack of insight that occurs in drug addiction [24]. Other behavioral accounts of the impact of negative mood on behavior include the idea that negative affect occupies attention, thereby leading to fewer resources to inhibit behavior [25], or that engaging in appetitive behaviors reduces anxiety and comforts the sel