In a context of growing awareness and prevalence of mental disorders, cognitive modeling has emerged as an important contribution to the study of the mind and its processes. Computational models have proved to be indispensable tools for precise and systematic simulations of cognitive processes, and have a potential application in the diagnosis and treatment of such pathologies. We propose a connectionist cognitive model that incorporates regulatory mechanisms, called Regulated Activation Networks (RANs), that will be applied to the modeling of psychological phenomena. This paper summarizes the current early stages of the development of the RANs model. The objectives, principles and approach taken are described, as well as the architecture of the RANs model, some preliminary results and plans for future work.