Cognitive processes in self-control and emotion regulation

The Self-Regulation, Attention, and Emotion Lab examines various topics at the intersection of self-regulation, emotion, and (social) cognition research. We are interested in understanding how people can succesfully pursue their multiple goals and motivations and how they cope with negative emotions. For instance, we aim to understand how people cope with adversity during goal pursuit such as conflicts between goals, motivations, and desires (e.g. aiming to live healthily versus wanting to have enjoyable or cheap food), or how they cope with failure and negative emotions. Much of our research investigates visual and perceptual processes such as attentional biases to emotional and goal-relevant events. In this project, we aim to investigate how people can successfully pursue important goals and motivations such as prosocial motivations, health-related goals (e.g. wanting to live and eat healthily), or emotion-related goals (e.g. wanting to feel happy; coping with negative emotions such as disgust or guilt). In particular, we aim to investigate the cognitive processes supporting succesful goal pursuit such as attention to goal-relevant information, planning & time management, goal prioritization, identification of means, obstacles, and self-control conflict, or inhibition of distractions.