Research Questions
Aging & Attention to Emotional Content
Research has consistently shown that people differ meaningfully in happiness and well-being, and that these differences can be linked to both personality and age. For example, optimistic people appear happier than their more pessimistic peers, whereas older people have been shown in recent research to show surprisingly high levels of well-being compared to their younger counterparts. Many of our studies aim to explain why this is the case, focusing on the role of attention in processing emotional information.
We often use eye tracking to investigate ways different people process emotional material in their environment while viewing different types of material. Tracking eye movements allows us to unlock the connections between how we feel and what we see. We also use innovative computer tasks, behavioral observations, and physiological measurement to examine how people of different ages behave and feel when in emotional situations.
Current projects are exploring the individual and age differences in attention to positive and negative emotional content, as well as the effects of such tendencies on memory, behavior, and emotional well-being.
Each project outlines the problem the client faced and a full explanation of how you went about solving it. This page will also dynamically pull your posts. Posts are a great way to build your portfolio. Pages are for static content.
“The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.” — Paul Rand, graphic designer
Aging & Emotion Regulation
People also vary in the ways in which they manage—or regulate—their emotions. In our lab, we study many different emotion regulation strategies, or the specific ways that people try to increase or decrease their emotional feelings and expressions. We examine which strategies people use, how effective they are, and whether emotion regulation varies with age.
Current projects examine emotion regulation by looking at visual attention, different ways of thinking, the choices people make, and emotional situations people enter or avoid. We look at emotion regulation both within the controlled environment of the lab and in everyday life, using smartphones, tablets, or laptops. Past research projects have also examined how people regulate the emotions of others.
Aging & Emotion Perception
Research has found age differences in how people recognize emotions such as anger, sadness, and happiness in others. Although older people often perform worse on these tasks, they show no deficits in their relationships and often report high levels of satisfaction with their social lives. One reason for this discrepancy may be that past research has typically relied on still photographs with exaggerated expressions.
In our work, we examine emotion perception in more dynamic situations, such as viewing ongoing conversations and interacting with real people, or provide people with more information about the context in which the emotion is happening. We combine eye tracking with a range of different stimuli and situations to examine whether age differences exist in these more realistic tasks, as well as how emotion perception is related to well-being.
Recent projects have focused on how pairs of people establish rapport during a social interaction, how people use background information to judge emotions, and how emotion perception is related to visual attention.
