Overview
How we recognize, express, and regulate our feelings is colored by many overlapping contexts. Similar events may result in different interpretations and emotional responses across cultures, individuals, and situations. These varied contexts do not function independently—they interact with one another and with our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, especially in moments of stress. This interaction can lead to resilience or risk of psychopathology.
The EPIC Lab studies the complex relationships between emotional processes and psychopathology and resilience from a person-context transactional perspective. Building such transaction theory requires studying participants in context.
Emotional responses are situated: their meaning and function are not fixed but vary with the contexts in which they occur. Study decontextualized individuals, and much of that meaning is inaccessible. We instead study the contextualized individual, treating context as a fundamental component of one' s emotional response and adaptation.
Different contexts directly shape or interact with an individual’s emotional processes. Culture evolves across generations, while developmental history unfolds throughout childhood and adolescence. Both directly shape the habitual ways we think, feel, and behave in various situations. Simultaneously, recent life events occur over weeks and months, and current situations shift from moment to moment, informing our emotional responses and how we adapt.
Historically, clinical psychological science has often fallen for the universality fallacy: the assumption that emotional responses are either adaptive or maladaptive, regardless of context. The EPIC Lab takes the opposite perspective: emotional responses may be adaptive or maladaptive, depending on their contexts, and this complexity determines resilience or risk for psychopathology.
Given that our emotional responses are more or less adaptive across contexts, the capacity to flexibly adapt as contexts shift is critical. Identifying different types of flexibility within our responses to emotional experiences requires understanding the processes that underpin them.
For instance, navigating an emotional situation involves multiple sequential processes: We evaluate what’s going on (e.g., Is the situation controllable? How intense am I feeling? Are close others present?). Then we implement strategies from our toolbox to match particular contexts (e.g., reappraising what cannot be controlled, but problem-solving what can). Finally, we monitor the efficacy of those strategies to maintain and switch responses as needed (e.g., Is this working?).
These processes involve dynamic types of flexibility. These include emotion regulation flexibility (adjusting how we regulate emotions across situational demands), belief flexibility (updating beliefs about oneself and the environment), and autonomic flexibility (mobilizing and recovering physiological resources across contexts). All of them inform how we adapt to shifting contexts.
The EPIC Lab aims to develop new methods of modeling and characterizing how flexible emotional systems shape psychopathology and resilience. Our goal is to generate knowledge about affective processes and self-regulation across cultural, developmental, and situational contexts and translate it into scalable preventions and interventions for diverse populations.