Automaticity in emotion regulation
Much of the current work on emotion regulation has focused on deliberate and controlled emotion regulation. However, individuals often seem to regulate their emotions automatically - without conscious awareness of what they are doing. Such automatic emotion regulatory processes are engendered by overlearned habits, culturally transmitted norms, and implicitly held beliefs. Given that emotion regulation often occurs automatically, we need to understand automatic regulatory processes if we want to fully understand emotion regulation. There might also be a very pragmatic gain from such knowledge. Automatic emotion regulation might allow individuals to avoid problematic emotion expression without the cost of some forms of deliberate regulation, because it is executed effortlessly. Unfortunately, we presently know very little about automatic emotion regulation. In the present project, we are exploring whether and how people can regulate their emotions automatically. We have developed methods to measure and experimentally manipulate automatic emotion regulation in order to learn more about it, and what its consequences are for individuals' well-being, psychosocial functioning, and health.

Emotion regulation and psychological health
Stressful life events (SLEs) such as death of a loved one, unemployment, or divorce are frequently encountered by all humans. Critically, for some, these SLEs lead to debilitating and long-lasting outcomes such as depression and anxiety disorders. Others, however, exhibit impressive resilience in the face of SLEs. What factors govern the vast individual variation in outcomes? One interesting possibility is suggested by emerging research, which implicates individuals� ability to use emotion regulation as a key psychological factor that predicts outcomes in the face of SLEs. The present project aims to advance our understanding of this lynchpin process in individuals� adjustment to SLEs. To do so, we (1) try to understand the developmental, cognitive, and emotional factors that lead to individual differences in emotion regulation ability, and (2) longitudinally examine the role that emotion regulation ability, as assessed by laboratory procedures, plays in adjustment to SLEs. The long-term objective of this research is to contribute to preventing maladaptive and fostering adaptive outcomes in individuals exposed to SLEs.

Coherence and dissociation of response systems
One major postulate of many contemporary theories of emotion is that emotion imposes coherence across multiple response systems (e.g., experiential, behavioral, and physiological). This postulate is derived from our understanding of emotions as functional, biologically adaptive entities. Surprisingly, few studies have tested this core hypothesis, and those that have done so have yielded mixed results. In this project, we obtain continuous measures of emotion experience, expression, and physiology, examining the conditions under which response coherence is evident. We are also interested in the consequences of low coherence, or dissociation, of responses for individuals' social functioning and physical health. An example for these questions is whether dissociation between experience of an emotion and its behavioral expression lead to adverse outcomes for an individual.

Anger and its regulation
Regulation of negative emotions, especially potentially destructive ones such as anger, is important in many domains of functioning, including well-being, social functioning, and health. Yet despite the fact that anger has to be regulated frequently in everyday life, effective anger control is difficult to achieve. In addition, certain forms of anger control (e.g., suppression) may have negative consequences for the individual. Two questions are particularly important in this context. First, how can individuals successfully regulate anger? One important strategy we are investigating in this context is cognitive reappraisal, or the ability to reframe a situation to feel less negative emotion. Second, under what conditions, if any, is anger control harmful to the individual itself? Some accounts suggest that in order to be an agentic, well-adapted person, one has to feel and express anger. We are interested in whether and under what conditions this is true.

Bodily responding and its perception in the construction of emotion experience
Nowhere do our mental processes seem to be more clearly embodied than they are in the emotions. Anxiety, for example, has a very salient bodily component, which can seem overwhelming in clinical contexts. The greater the anxiety becomes, the more obvious the racing heart and the sweating palms might appear. Surprisingly, however, there is very limited empirical support for this intuitive link, and there are cases in which there appears to be a complete disconnect between bodily responding and emotional experience. In this project, we concurrently assess emotional experience, perceived physiological responses, and actual physiological responses during laboratory emotion inductions, finding that people have very little insight into their actual physiological responses. This disconnect between perceived bodily responses and actual bodily responses could help us make sense of the connection (and the lack thereof) between bodily responding and emotional experience, suggesting that emotions might be more �mind-stuff� than �body-stuff.�