Our lab is interested in emotion and emotion regulation. Our lives are saturated with emotions (feelings, emotional behaviors, and associated bodily reactions), yet emotions usually don't just happen to us. Most of the time, we attempt to regulate our emotions in some way, by denying, intensifying, weakening, curtailing, masking, or completely altering them.

The fact that we have emotions -- and also try to regulate them -- raises a number of important, yet not very well-understood questions. For example, why do some people or groups of people experience more negative emotions than others? What role does our sociocultural context play in shaping the emotions we experience and express? How can people regulate their emotions in order to be nicer and less destructive toward themselves and others? What forms of emotion regulation are more adaptive in the long run, what ways are less adaptive, for whom, and under what conditions? What is the association between different aspects of emotional responding?

We use a number of different methods to understand emotion and emotion regulation, including: (a) Emotion experience sampling in laboratory settings; (b) Questionnaires assessing individual differences in emotion and emotion regulation; (c) Implicit assessment methods (e.g., IAT); (d) Behavior coding (assessment of expression of emotions, e.g., via coding of facial expressions); (e) Measurement of physiological responses (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate); (f) fMRI.

Within the broad area of emotion and emotion regulation, we are particularly interested in five more specific research areas.  Under "projects" you can find a brief description of each.