Iris Mauss
Assistant Professor, 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 weakening, denying, intensifying, curtailing, masking, or completely altering them.

The fact that people usually attempt to regulate their emotions leads to a number of important questions, which I try to address. For example, why do some people experience more negative emotions than others, with sometimes debilitating consequences? What is the association between different aspects of emotional responding, and how does emotion regulation affect this association? What role do people's sociocultural contexts � and especially the beliefs and values they entail � play in shaping their emotions? How does the way people regulate their emotions affect their social interactions? 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, what forms are less adaptive, for whom, and under what conditions? What enables some people to use adaptive forms of emotion regulation, and can we teach others to use these types of emotion regulation?

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 emotional behaviors, e.g., via coding of facial expressions); (e) and measurement of autonomic physiological responses (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate).

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

Representative Publications:

Mauss, I. B., & Butler, E. A. (2010). Cultural background moderates the relationship between emotion control values and cardiovascular challenge versus threat responses. Biological Psychology, 84, 521-530.

Mauss, I. B., & Robinson, M. D. (2009). Measures of emotion: A review. Cognition and Emotion, 23, 209-237.

Mauss, I. B., Bunge, S. A., & Gross, J. J. (2007). Automatic emotion regulation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1, 146-167.

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.

Iris Mauss
Ph.D. 2005, Stanford University

Assistant Professor, Affect/Social,
DCN, and Cognitive
office:Frontier,
Rm. 355
phone: 303.871.4132
e-mail: imauss@psy.du.edu

Director
Emotion Regulation Lab

Faculty Member
Stress Research Network