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
The neural bases of cognitive reappraisal
The coherence of emotion
Computational modeling of collective emotions
Personality, emotion, and emotion regulation
Emotion regulation and social functioning
Emotion regulation of mixed emotions
Temporal dynamics of emotion generation and regulation
Emotion reactivity and regulation in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and parents of children with ASD
Teaching emotion regulation to improve academic achievement
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