Prof. Mark Boyes

Emotion, emotion regulation, and emotional vulnerability

 

I am collaborating with Prof Ottmar Lipp (Curtin University), Associate Prof Penelope Hasking (Curtin University), and the Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion (University of Western Australia) on projects in the broad area of emotion, emotion regulation, and emotional vulnerability.

 

Some examples of the types of questions we are interested in include:

 

• Distinguishing between dimensions of emotional reactivity (reflecting increased probability of experiencing emotional responses), intensity (reflecting the strength of an emotional response), and emotional perseveration (reflecting duration of emotional responses once elicted). These dimensions will be investigated in the the context of both general positive and negative emotion, as well as specific emotional states (e.g. anger, fear, and amusement)

 

• Identifying variables that might modulate emotional reactivity, intensity, and perseveration (e.g. individual differences in emotion regulation and biases in selective attention and interpretation)  

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• Identifying associations between emotional reactivity, intensity, perseveration, and outcomes influenced by emotion (e.g. mental health, health behaviour, consumer behaviour, and desicion making)

 

These projects incorporate survey and experimental methodologies, including self-report, physiological, and cognitive measures, and offer a number of possibilities for Honours and PhD research.  

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I am also interested in individual differences in stressor appraisal and coping, as well as the measurement of coping. With regard to measurement, I am interested in whether there might be item-confounds between dispositional measures of 'maladaptive' coping and measures of psychological distress that might account for consistently reported associations between measures of maladaptive coping and psychological distress.

 

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