OUR Research Approach
At the Affective Science & Health Lab, we examine emotions — powerful experiences that shape how people interpret, respond to, and influence the social world around them.
Although people can protect their well-being by regulating their emotions, our research challenges common assumptions about which emotions are best to feel and which regulation strategies are best to employ.
Some of our findings:
Negative emotions can help people pursue valued goals,
Striving to feel happy can paradoxically promote worse well-being,
Regulating emotions can backfire by promoting complacency instead of action at times when action is needed most (e.g., to address pressing social issues).
These insights underscore a crucial need to build better models of when, why, and for whom emotion regulation is beneficial or harmful.
Our methods:
Our lab prioritizes rigorous, multi-method, and replicable research. We use subjective, behavioral, and physiological measures in well-powered experimental, daily diary, and longitudinal designs, promoting transparent science via data sharing and preregistration. To ensure our work reflects the richness of human experience, we prioritize diverse perspectives in our research team by welcoming scholars from diverse backgrounds, and in our research itself by recruiting large, diverse participant samples and examining how socio-cultural contexts shape emotion regulation. We aim to build inclusive scientific models that are representative of the people our research should be serving.
These foundations support two core research lines:
(1) understanding people’s beliefs about emotions and how they shape people’s lives
(2) identifying when emotion regulation is helpful or harmful, including when ‘healthy’ emotion regulation interferes with the motivation to act on urgent societal issues.
For more information, check out our Research page!
recent publications
Why does valuing happiness backfire? In a forthcoming issue of Emotion, we show how and why valuing happiness can go awry (see paper here).
What are the costs of protecting your well-being in the face of political stress? In a recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we show that day-to-day politics is stressful, predicts worse well-being in daily life, but that people can protect their well-being by using emotion regulation. However, being more successful at emotion regulation predicts lower motivation to engage in democracy-shaping political action (see paper here).
Is it always helpful to believe emotions are controllable? In a recent issue of Motivation and Emotion, we find that believing a suffering person’s emotions are controllable — a growth mindset — predicts harsher judgments and more avoidance of the sufferer. These findings point to important costs of growth mindsets about emotion control (see paper here).
Check out the new Handbook of Emotion Regulation!
This extensively revised 3rd edition features 71 concise chapters that reflect a decade of continuing, rapid advances in theory, methods, and findings. There are new sections on emotion regulation in groups and collectives, interventions, and emotion regulation across disciplines, as well as increased attention to the role of emotion regulation in culture, and broader societal issues.