Emotional Development & Mental Health

The Emotion Regulation Lab focuses on one fundamental question: How do emotions organize development and facilitate or hinder mental health? Emotions permeate and influence every aspect of our lives. Indeed, even moderate fluctuations in emotion systematically change, and are changed by, biological states, cognitions, goals, behaviors, and social interactions. Emotion regulation refers to the flexibility and control of these changes, and has a direct and profound influence on our daily actions and on our ability to cope with conflict and challenge.

Ultimately, our mission is to use the concept of emotion regulation to better understand how emotions promote competence or in some cases create vulnerability for psychopathology, particularly anxiety and mood disorders. We integrate the use of physiological and behavioral assessment tools to refine the conceptualization and measurement of emotion regulation and disorders of mood.

Topics of interest include:

1.      Biomarkers for emotion regulation and anxiety-related threat biases

2.     Attention training to reduce the threat bias

3.     The influence of social media on emotional adjustment

4.      Emotion- cognition integration