So this year, I spent my birthday in sunny San Diego! Coincidentally, the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference was being held in California this year and I was presenting some of my emotion regulation research at Emotion Pre-Conference.
I of course had a blast and was able to meet what I reference as “intellectual crushes” because I find myself constantly on their websites or reading their research to unwind. Here were some of my favorite spottings of the conference:
- Abigail Marsh (researches psychopaths & extreme altruists)
- http://www.abigailmarsh.com/
- Barb Fredrickson (researches positive emotion)
- http://www.unc.edu/peplab/barb_fredrickson_page.html
- John Dovido (researches helping behaviors)
- http://psychology.yale.edu/faculty/john-dovidio
- Kristen Lindquist (emotion responses in brain, detectable?)
- http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lindqukr/
- Jerry Clore (types of emotions)
- http://clore.socialpsychology.org/
If you’re an undergrad and you want to go to grad school or into academia (particularly research), it is great for you to do what you can to get your name and research out into the field that you seek to be a part of. If this is something you’re interested in, please contact me so we can try to get you connected with a research lab.
Here is my abstract:
REGULATION OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EMOTION: EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CONTEXT
Previous research has demonstrated the use of emotion regulation strategies can vary by social context. One unique social context, in terms of emotion regulation, is an annual art festival that creates a temporary culture known as Burning Man. In this social context, participants use expressive suppression (a strategy generally associated with maladaptive outcomes) less frequently, and cognitive reappraisal (a strategy associated with adaptive outcomes) more frequently (McRae, Heller, John, & Gross, 2011). What is unclear is whether these changes in emotion regulation strategy use are different for the regulation of positive and negative emotions. To address this question, participants at Burning Man were asked to report their use of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal, when at the festival and at home. Using three separate datasets, we demonstrated that the decreased use of suppression is more strongly driven by the decreased suppression of positive emotions at Burning Man. We did not observe systematic differences in the reappraisal of positive and negative emotions. These findings have implications for understanding the maladaptive effects of suppression and the contexts in which they are minimized.
Here are some links for further information on the conference & my research:
2012 SPSP Conference website:
http://www.spspmeeting.org/
2012 Emotion Pre-Conference: http://psych.la.psu.edu/preconference/index.shtml
Lab research coming out of (Automaticity, Affect, Control & Thought Lab):
http://www.du.edu/psychology/aactlab/aact/AACT_Lab_Home.html
Burning Man Festival (our population):
http://www.burningman.com/
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