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Projects

Our research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Ongoing projects include:

The Trauma Group

This group aims to better understand how childhood experiences of abuse and neglect influence one's perception of the self, and more specifically, emotional reactivity to one's own face. We are exploring how these early life experiences may impact emotional reaction to one's own face, to a morphed version of one's face, and whether there are patterns in the experience of depersonalization following manipulations of face related stimuli, and any correlated difficulties in recognizing the self. join us, Website

Using Technology to regulate affect: a multidisciplinary perspective 

Our aim through this project is to develop and evaluate new and innovative vibrotactile technologies that assist individuals with affect regulation. A unique aspect of our contribution comes from the interdisciplinarity of our team. Included on our team are experts in emotion regulation, haptics, electrical engineering, HCI, and distributed systems, as well as experts in the clinical application of biofeedback. We believe that such an interdisciplinary approach is necessary for making progress in the development of technology that assists in affect regulation. To learn more about the specific projects please visit our page: wehab.stanford.edu

Multimodal, naturalistic assessment of emotional experiences

The goal of this project is to use self-report and behavioral assessments in individual’s daily lives to better understand how emotional processes unfold over time. The project idea includes the use of daily surveys and behavioral data sampling via periodic, random recordings of ambient sounds to better capture and understand how individuals experience a variety of emotional and interpersonal states in real time. Through this line of work, we are better able to (a) compare naturalistic data with cross-sectional data to determine how much they converge, (b) compare self-report with behavioral data to determine how much they converge, (c) model the self-report and behavioral compositions of latent emotional constructs such as anxiety, depression, and other emotional states, and (d) test predictors of emotional and interpersonal change over time. 

The affective consequences of emotion reguation

This project is concerned with understanding the physiological, behavioral, and experiential consequences of important emotion regulation strategies such as expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal, and rumination. One goal of this project is to better understand how differing forms of emotion regulation alter the trajectory of the emotion-generative process.

The neural bases of cognitive reappraisal

This project examines the neural bases of one important form of emotion regulation, namely reappraisal, which involves altering the emotional significance of a stimulus by changing how one thinks about that stimulus. Using fMRI measures of brain activation, this project tests hypotheses concerning specific prefrontal regions thought to be associated with cognitive control, as well as specific subcortical structures such as the amygdala, thought to be associated with emotion.

The coherence of emotion

One major postulate of many contemporary theories of emotion is that emotion imposes coherence across multiple response systems (e.g., experiential, behavioral, and physiological). Surprisingly, few studies have tested this core hypothesis, and those that have done so have yielded mixed results. In this project, we are obtaining continuous measures of emotion experience, expression, and physiology, and examining the conditions under which responses coherence is evident.

Computational modeling of collective emotions

The goal of this project is to create a computational model that will help us understand the unfolding of emotions at the group level (collective emotion) and to correlate this model with real life events. The project includes three parts. In the first part, we conduct lab experiments to learn how people perceive collective emotions and how they are influenced by these emotions. In the second part, we use these insights as a basis for a computational model (agent-based model) of collective emotion. In the third part we correlate our model with data from social networks. In the current project, we use Twitter data from the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson for our analyses.

Personality, emotion, and emotion regulation

This project explores the relations between personality (measured at multiple levels, ranging from the broad - e.g. Extroversion, Neuroticism - to the specific -e.g., emotional expressivity) and measures of typical emotional experience, expression, and regulation. One goal of this work is to understand the role individual differences play in basic emotion and emotion regulation processes.

Emotion regulation and social functioning

This project examines the role of emotion and emotion regulation in social functioning. Social functioning is assessed in multiple contexts ranging from peer reports of typical behavior to conflict conversations between dating partners. One goal of this research is to understand how different forms of emotion regulation affect social functioning. A second goal of this project is to better understand the impact of individual differences in emotion regulation on important outcomes such as social networks and relationship longevity.

Emotion regulation of mixed emotions

This project studies emotion regulation in the context of emotionally ambiguous cues. Stimuli are often not univocal, clear, and well defined regarding their emotional meaning, but are rather under-determined and ambivalent. To better understand the regulatory strategies that influence the responses to situations that may elicit mixed emotional feelings, we systematically elicit such feelings in the lab. One goal of this project is to discern how different emotion regulation strategies alter the emotional response to ambiguous situations.

Temporal dynamics of emotion generation and regulation

This project uses EEG/ERP methods to examine how the processes involved in emotion generation and regulation unfold over time. The central assumption guiding this line of research is that the temporal features of such processes can inform our understanding of how they operate, as well as how they may be rendered dysfunctional in certain forms of psychopathology.

Emotion reactivity and regulation in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and parents of children with ASD

Emotional disturbances are commonly observed in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), however, the scientific understanding of causes and consequences of such emotional disturbances are limited. The SPL lab has examined in a multi-method, multi-session study emotion reactivity and emotion regulation in children and adolescents with ASD. On the basis of the insights from this study, a parenting workshop has been developed to support parents of children on the spectrum. In the workshop we present evidence based strategies to help parents regulate both their emotions as well as their children's.

Teaching emotion regulation to improve academic achievement

Middle school represents a critical transition for students, and many students show a decline in academic achievement and emotional well-being during this time. To reverse these negative outcomes, we are developing an online intervention designed to teach sixth- and seventh-graders a growth mindset of emotion regulation and give them emotion regulation strategies, with the goal of improving academic performance. This research is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
 

Emotions and cancer caregiving

The goal of this project is to better understand how emotion regulation operates in the context of cancer caregiving. We are examining how breast cancer caregivers manage their emotions and how caregiver emotion regulation affects the health of both patients and their caregivers. This project is being funded by the National Science Foundation. website

Sleep, emotion, and emotion regulation

This project aims to understand how our daytime emotional experiences impact sleep, and how sleep influences next-day emotional experiences. In particular, we are studying the relationship between emotion regulation capability and sleep. We use a variety of methods including ecological momentary assessments, behavioral tasks, actigraphy, polysomnography, psychophysiology, EEG, and fMRI to capture the dynamics of emotions and sleep in the laboratory and out in the world during people's daily lives. We hope to understand specific deficits in emotion regulation related to poor sleep and develop interventions to improve both sleep and mood. website

Appraisal as a mechanism for emotion regulation

Appraisal theories of emotion have generally focused on the relationships between appraisal and emotion generation. To build of this work, we are developing a framework that merges appraisal theory with the process model of emotion regulation, with the goal of forging a mechanistic understanding of how different emotion regulation strategies ultimately modulate emotion via the appraisal process. In this line of research, we are using self-report and physiological measures to quantify how appraisals change during not only emotion generation, but also emotion regulation.

Affect and dietary decision-making

Prior research has shown that experiencing negative affect tends to lead people to engage in unhealthy behaviors, such as unhealthy eating. In a series of lab and field studies, we are examining the mechanisms by which negative affect leads to poor dietary self-control. In addition, we are exploring whether affect regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal might be applied to improve dietary decision-making via down-regulation of negative affect