Iris Mauss
Affect/Social, DCN, and Cognitive

I am 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 does the way we regulate our emotions affect our social context? 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?

I 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 autonomic physiological responses (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate), and (f) brain imaging (fMRI).

The research I and my lab are doing is described in more detail in my my website.

Representative Publications:

Mauss, I. B., & Robinson, M. D. (in press). Measures of emotion: A review. Cognition and Emotion.

Mauss, I. B., Cook, C. L., Cheng, J. Y. J., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Individual differences in cognitive reappraisal: Experiential and physiological responses to an anger provocation. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 66, 116-124.

Mauss, I. B., Cook, C. L., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Automatic emotion regulation during an anger provocation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 698-711.

Mauss, I. B., Evers, C., Wilhelm, F. H., & Gross, J. J. (2006). How to bite your tongue without blowing your top: Implicit evaluation of emotion regulation predicts affective responding to anger provocation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 389-602

Mauss, I. B., Levenson, R. W., McCarter, L., Wilhelm, F. H., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The tie that binds? Coherence among emotional experience, behavior, and autonomic physiology. Emotion, 5, 175-190.

Mauss, I. B., Wilhelm, F. H., & Gross, J. J. (2004). Is there less to social anxiety than meets the eye? Emotion experience, expression, and bodily responding. Cognition and Emotion, 18, 631-662.

Mauss, I. B., & Gross, J. J. (2004). Emotion suppression and cardiovascular disease: Is hiding your feelings bad for your heart? In L.R. Temoshok, A. Vingerhoets, & I. Nyklicek (Eds.), The expression of emotion and health (pp. 62-81). London: Brunner-Routledge.

Iris Mauss
Ph.D. 2005, Stanford University

Assistant Professor
office:Frontier,
Rm. 355
phone: 303.871.4132
e-mail: imauss@psy.du.edu

Director
Emotion Regulation Lab

Faculty Member
Stress Research Network