Current Projects

• Well-Being Affected by Secrecy Processes

  Everybody keeps secrets – research shows that 97% of people are keeping at least one secret at any given time. This study is designed to understand the impact of keeping a secret on our psychology. We investigate people’s experiences of secrecy across the course of one week (but we will never ask you to describe your secrets in detail). Head to the dedicated study page to find out more.

• Emotional and Social Experiences During Lockdown

  Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers have tried to balance the effectiveness of lockdowns with their potential mental health costs. Yet, two years into the pandemic, we are still lacking solid evidence about the social and emotional impact of lockdowns. Using two experience-sampling datasets collected during Melbourne’s fifth and sixth lockdowns in 2021, we investigated how people’s emotional (Project 1) and social (Project 2) functioning compared on days in vs. out of lockdown. We find that lockdowns took a mildly negative emotional toll and did not drastically impair people’s social lives. Our data suggest that either people are resilient to the challenges lockdowns pose to emotional and social well-being, that lockdown does not severely compound the overall effects of the pandemic, or both.

  For details of Project 1—The Emotional Anatomy of Lockdown—see this publication

  Details for Project 2—The Dynamics of Social Experiences in the Context of Extended Lockdown—coming soon!

• Climate Change Anxiety

  Climate change anxiety is a growing problem for individual well-being. There are many existing interventions that address climate change anxiety, many of which may have unintended effects on outcomes other than individual well-being. This project presents a multiple-needs framework that can be used to analyse interventions in terms of their effects on individual, social, and environmental outcomes, allowing different stakeholders to choose the intervention that best suits their unique needs. Head to the dedicated study page to find out more.

Past Projects

• Emotional Responses to Uncertainty

  This project seeks to understand people's emotional responses to uncertain events (e.g., awaiting results of an academic exam or medical test) in everyday life, how people cope with such events, and whether our understanding of these processes depends on the methods we use to measure emotions.

• Secrecy, Concealment, Affect and Mind-wandering in Everyday Life

  Emerging research suggests that secrecy is common and costly for people's wellbeing. Yet, little is known about why this is and how people can cope with secrecy. This study aims to address outstanding theoretical and methodological blind-spots in the literature by studying secrecy using daily diary methodology which captures processes on a day-by-day basis to better understand how secrecy unfolds in everyday life.

• Emotional Experiences During Everyday Social Interactions

  Interpersonal emotion regulation is an emerging research area of interest, however, only limited research has investigated interpersonal emotional regulation in everyday life. This study aims to address this gap in the literature by investigating why and how people engage in interpersonal emotion regulation in everyday social interactions, and the relational and emotional outcomes of these social experiences.

• Assessing Emotions in Everyday Life

  We’d like to invite you to participate in a project on assessing and managing your
  emotions in everyday life. This research investigates your interactions and  emotional experiences across the course of a week, and how you manage these experiences. You’ll have the chance to earn up to $65, and receive a personalized report of your emotions.

• Daily Experiences of Social Connection in Victoria

  Victoria is coming out of restrictions that curtailed people’s movements and ability to socialise with others. For many people, this is having a huge impact on health, well-being, and social relationships. This study will ask about your experiences of social connections and their impact on your daily life. It will take place over the course of 9 days (about 2 hours total commitment).

• Managing Emotions in Everyday Life

  How we manage our emotions in response to real-life emotional challenges is key to our well-being. This research aims to investigate your emotional experiences across the course of a week, and how you manage those everyday emotional experiences.

• Mobile Momentary Mindfulness (MMM) and Emotions in Everyday Life

  This research project aims to advance emotion science by systematically investigating the role of brief momentary mindfulness practice on people’s emotional experiences in daily life. The aim is to identify healthy patterns of emotions together with beneficial context(s) which enhance psychological well-being.

• Secrets in Everyday Life 

  Everybody keeps secrets – psychology research shows that 97% of people are keeping at least one secret at any given time. This study will investigate people’s experiences of secrecy across the course of a week. We will never ask you to describe your secrets in detail; this study is designed to understand the impact of keeping a secret on our psychology.

• The FEEL Research Project (Study 2)

  The FEEL Research Project uses cutting-edge mobile technologies to track people's feelings and physiology (e.g., heart rate), as well as their use of different emotion regulation strategies, while they go about their usual daily activities. The aim is to investigate how people manage their emotions in daily life and to reveal when, and for whom, different strategies are most effective. This research will improve scientific understanding of emotions and emotion regulation in daily life, and will contribute to the development of targeted interventions for improving everyday emotion regulation. We hope that this knowledge will help people to achieve and maintain optimal psychological health and well-being.

• The FEEL Research Project (Study 1)

  The first phase of the FEEL Research Project was conducted at Australian Catholic University in 2016. This 3-week project aimed to examine how people, from a variety of different backgrounds, experience and manage their emotions in daily life. Specifically, using a smartphone app (SEMA), participants were asked to respond to a number of questions about how they are feeling, their social context and how they perceive their environment, and how they have tried to manage or regulate their emotions 10 times per day for 21 consecutive days. During the 21 days, we will also measured participants' heart rate and skin conductance levels in daily life using a lightweight wristband monitor. Data analysis and publications are still in progress for this research project.

• Regulating Emotion Systems in Daily Life.

  How people regulate their emotions is thought to be crucial for their psychological well-being, yet little is known about emotion regulation in daily life because most research has relied on lab experiments or global/retrospective surveys. Researchers are starting to investigate how people regulate their emotions across various situations in daily life using naturalistic methods such as ecological momentary assessment (EMA). However, validated measures of daily emotion regulation are lacking, leaving researchers to develop their own ad-hoc measures and making it difficult to synthesise findings across studies. The current study aims to develop a new 12-item EMA measure of emotion regulation in daily life by adapting the recently developed Regulation of Emotion Systems Survey (RESS; De France & Hollenstein, 2017).