Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression Lab, Hunter College

Emotion Dysregulation Perspective on Anxiety and Mood Disorders

Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression (READ) Lab is focused on understanding and treating chronic and recurrent forms of anxiety and mood disorders, particularly generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depression (MDD), from a perspective that highlights how emotions are poorly processed and become dysregulated. An affect science perspective stresses a number of emotion characteristics that are relevant to adult psychopathology and its treatment. First, although not always productive, emotions are signals for both approach and avoidance motivations in service of survival adaptation or societal function. Second, emotions are defined by multiple interacting systems, which operate through both convergent and divergent means. Third, these emotion systems mutually regulate each other in order to maintain stability through changing environmental contexts. This regulatory function of emotions has been shown to be important to well being and to the promotion of mental health. In contrast, disorder and dysfunction may represent perturbations to the flexible balancing of these emotional response systems.

In the READ lab at Hunter College University, we are currently working on testing aspects of this model through (1) experimental delineation of multicomponential (i.e., subjective, physiological, expressive) processes that contribute to emotion reactivity and dysregulation in GAD, MDD, and their co-occurrence; (2) development of more ecologically-valid measures of emotion-related deficits relevant to anxiety and mood disorders, which might be sensitive to treatment change; and (3) the development of an integrative emotion regulation treatment for GAD and accompanying MDD.

Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression Lab

Department of Psychology, Hunter College

695 Park Avenue, Hunter North: Rooms 636 & 738 New York,NY 10065