Functions of Emotions in Everyday Life (FEEL) Research Lab
Background
Emotions are present in almost every moment of our daily lives, adding colour to our experience of the world. Emotions can range from mild enjoyment or annoyance–often triggered by everyday pleasures or hassles, to intense joy or sadness–usually in response to more momentous events. Although emotions have traditionally been defined as very brief, psychologists are discovering that they can last anywhere from seconds to hours or days. While our emotions are often very helpful, at times we also seek to control and manage how and when our emotions unfold. This ability to regulate emotions is thought to be critical to health and well-being.
Scientists studying emotions are only beginning to understand the complexities of how emotions function in daily life. Although important discoveries have been made in the lab, we don't know how much these findings apply to how people experience and manage their emotions in the "real world". The FEEL Lab aims to discover how emotions function in the rich and complex environments we encounter in our daily lives.
Funded PhD Position
The FEEL Lab is offering a 3-year PhD scholarship for a research project entitled Emotion dynamics and well-being, funded by an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship awarded to Dr Peter Koval. For more information click the link below.
Lab News
Is emotional stability all it’s cracked up to be? (May, 2018)
Emotional stability is often described as a hallmark of psychological health and well-being. Yet, one of the primary functions of our emotions is to fluctuate and change over time following the ebb and flow of daily life. This lecture, presented by Dr Peter Koval (head of FEEL Lab) will explore recent research on “emotion dynamics”, which suggests that emotional stability may not necessarily be a good thing. Psychological health requires emotions to be flexible rather than stable. Ideally emotions respond to environmental changes, but are also well regulated. The lecture will examine research, conducted inside the laboratory and outside in our everyday environments, that links emotional flexibility with better psychological functioning and well-being.
Lecture Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7qZhtd067k
Current Members
- Dr Peter Koval
Co-director of Lab
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
+61 3 9035 5649
- Dr Katie Greenaway
Co-director of Lab
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
+61 3 9035 3013
- Nerisa Dozo
Lab Manager
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
+61 3 8344 7827
- Jordan Hinton
Research Assistant
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
+61 3 8344 7827
- Ann Ee Ching
Honours Student
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
- Hayley Medland
Honours Student
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
- Khai Shin Lee
Honours Student
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
- Sarah Paling
Research Intern
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
- Orsolya Benke
Research Intern
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
- David Mussoff
Research Intern
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
- Lois Kim
Research Intern
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
- Stephanie Au Yeung
Research Intern
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
External Collaborators
- Professor John Gleeson
Australian Catholic University
Professor John Gleeson
John Gleeson is Professor and Head of the School of Psychology at the Australian Catholic University. John is a clinical psychologist with 20 years experience in severe mental health problems. His research interests include psychological treatments in youth with psychosis, the use of moderated on-line social interventions for youth with mental health problems, and experience sampling methods in the understanding of anxiety and mood problems.
- Professor Peter Kuppens
KU Leuven
University of Leuven
Professor Peter Kuppens
Peter Kuppens is Professor in the Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences at KU Leuven, Belgium. Peter's research focuses on componential (e.g., appraisal) theories of emotions, individual differences in emotional appraisal, experience, and dynamics and their relationships with personality and well-being, and formal models for contextualised personality and emotion research.
- Associate Professor Tom Hollenstein
Queen's University, Canada
Associate Professor Tom Hollenstein
Tom Hollenstein is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Canada. Tom's research examines socioemotional development, particularly in adolescence. Specifically, Tom's research focuses on the regulation of emotion as evidenced by changes in self-reported feelings, autonomic psychophysiology, and behavioural expressions. Tom is also active in developing and applying methods for the analysis of change, including state space grids (www.statespacegrids.org).
Past Members
Keana Loschiavo (Honours Student, 2016)
Freya Hanly (Honours Student, 2016)
Hon Chung (Tommy) Choi (Honours Student, 2017)
Tim Reynolds (Honours Student, 2017)
Current Projects
- 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.
What Does Participation Involve?
1. Initial Lab Session (~ 90 min): You will be asked to attend an initial/baseline lab session at The University of Melbourne where you will be asked to complete some questionnaires, be fitted with your E4 mobile physiology wristband, and receive login details and instructions for completing the smartphone surveys. This session will take approximately 90 minutes.
2. 14-day Mobile Assessment: For the next 14 days you’ll simply go about your regular daily activities, while wearing the E4 wristband and completing 12 brief smartphone surveys per day. 6 of the surveys you will complete each day will be very brief (30sec - 1min) and will only be asking about your current mood. The other 6 surveys you will be asked to complete each day will take around 3-4min and will be asking you a range of different questions related to your mood and your feelings towards a recent negative, unpleasant, or stressful event/situation that has occurred. These surveys will occur roughly every hour within a 12-hour period of the day (from 10am – 10pm), and you will be required to wear the wristband for the same period of time. The E4 wristband will measure your physiology (e.g., heart rate and skin conductance) throughout the day, and data from this wristband will be uploaded at the end of each week. You will need to charge this device each night to ensure that it has enough battery to record data for the next day. It is very important that you answer the smartphone surveys in a reliable way. The success of the research project depends on our participant’s motivation to do their best!
3. Follow-up Lab Sessions (~ 30-60 min): At the end of each week, you’ll be asked to come back to The University of Melbourne for a brief follow-up lab session to complete another set of questionnaires and return your E4 wristband so we can upload your data. At the end of the first week (exactly one week from your initial lab session) during your lab session we will also be giving you some more instructions for completing the smartphone surveys during each day of your second week participating. During your final lab session we will also organize your reimbursement for participating. NOTE: It is very important for our research that your lab sessions are exactly one week a part from each other, so please keep this in mind when we book in your appointment.
What Do I Get In Return?
a) Warm Fuzzy Feeling - As a participant in the FEEL Research Project, you will be contributing to a richer scientific understanding of emotional functioning in daily life. This tremendously important topic is at the core of what it means to be a human being. Our findings will not only further science but may also inform how psychologists and other mental health professionals treat emotional disorders in the future. We need your help to develop a rich understanding of how people experience and manage their positive and negative emotions in daily life.
b) Payment - No matter how motivated you are to advance the scientific understanding of emotions, we understand that taking time out of your busy schedule is not easy. That's why we reimburse all participants for their time and commitment to the project. For more information about the participant payment, please contact us.
Who Can Participate?
You may be eligible to participate if you:
Are over 18 years old / Speak fluent English (i.e., native-speaker or highly proficient in English) / Own a compatible smartphone (iOS or Android) / Are NOT currently taking heart or blood pressure medication (e.g., beta-blockers; ACE inhibitors) / Are NOT pregnant
Where Is The Research Being Conducted? The initial and follow-up lab sessions will be held at the FEEL Lab, The University of Melbourne.
How do I Sign Up? If you would like to participate, please contact us at feelresearchlab@gmail.com
- 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).
What Does Participation Involve? Participants will be asked to attend an introductory lab session, during which they will complete computer-based questionnaires assessing various domains, including habitual emotion regulation, personality, trait emotionality, and well-being. At the end of this session, participants will be asked to download and install a smartphone app (SEMA2), which will prompt them to complete a short survey 8 times per day over the following 7 days.
How do I Sign Up? If you would like to participate, please contact Hayley Medland at hmedland@student.unimelb.edu.au
Past Projects
- 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.
Lab Contact Details
T: + 61 3 8344 7827
M: + 61 (0)416 016 296
E: feelresearchlab@gmail.com
Address:
FEEL Lab
Room 620
Level 6, Redmond Barry Building
Tin Alley, The University of Melbourne
Parkville, 3010, VIC, Australia
Coming Soon!
SEMA
Smartphone Ecological Momentary Assessment (or SEMA) is a suite of software for designing and conducting smartphone-based survey research. SEMA was designed specifically for ecological momentary assessment (EMA), also known as the experience sampling method (ESM), which typically involves administering a survey several times per day (at random times) over several days. However, SEMA can also be used to administer surveys less frequently (e.g., once daily, as in daily diary studies), or on an ad hoc basis (i.e., participants launch the survey manually at any time).
Following extensive testing of the initial version of SEMA in 2013-2014, SEMA version 2 was developed in 2015 by researchers at Australian Catholic University and Orygen-The National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, in collaboration with a private software developer, Boosted Human. SEMA includes a multitude of features that enable researchers to easily and intuitively create and administer smartphone surveys and easily access and analyse collected data.
Website: https://sema-surveys.com/
SEMA (Version 3)
Coming Soon!