Faculty Profiles

BIO

Although the emotions we experience usually serve an adaptive function, sometimes they take hold of us in ways that are harmful, interfering with how we ideally want to think, feel, and behave. These are the situations that most intrigue me. My research aims to illuminate how people can effectively control their emotions under such circumstances. My motivation to pursue this issue is driven by two goals: to shed light on the basic mechanisms that underlie emotion regulation and examine their translational implications.
Because emotions are relevant to nearly every sub-discipline of psychology, my work sits on the boundaries of multiple areas of research (e.g. social-personality, clinical, cognitive-neuroscience, developmental). I integrate across these areas both in terms of the types of questions I ask and in the methods I use to address them. For example, my work brings together experiments that isolate causal mechanisms with longitudinal studies that examine how psychological processes unfold naturally over time in daily life. My research is also multi-level. It examines how phenomena play out across different levels of analysis (e.g., explicit, implicit, autonomic, neural, behavioral, cultural) to build integrative models of how they operate.