How good food and beer can help us regulate: EROS at the ISRE conference
Posted on Aug 26, 2009 by Gwenda Simons
I am about to fulfil a promise made by Paul Davis in the June BLOG. In this August BLOG I will be reporting on our attendance at the ISRE conference. The conferences of the International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE) are currently occurring every two years (although we just had a spell of yearly conferences) and bring together emotion researchers from a wide variety of disciplines and countries. The XVIIth conference took place in Leuven, Belgium from the 6th to the 8th of August and was hosted by the University of Leuven. The programme was very diverse and with up to five parallel sessions at most times, there was plenty of choice. Some might say even too much choice at times. I for one frequently had to decide between at least two parallel sessions which had caught my attention (See also http://www.isre-2009-leuven.com/ for the full programme, abstracts and photo reports of the conference).
Emotion regulation was a well represented topic at the conference, with three symposia, (one on the developmental origins of emotion regulation and stress responsivity; one on affect regulation in depression and anxiety and one on a neuroanatomical model of emotion regulation); a hot topic session (Emotion Regulation) as well as several relevant presentations under other headings. There further was a poster stream with 22 posters on topics related to emotion regulation.
This year’s conference saw various members of the EROS consortium presenting their research in several hot topic sessions and as part of a symposium. Our principal investigator, Peter Totterdell (Work Psychology, Sheffield University) kicked things off with a symposium presentation entitled: ‘Deliberate interpersonal emotion regulation in organisational groups: Asymmetric effects’ on the first day of the conference. On day two there were presentations from Paul Davis (Wolverhampton) Andy Lane (Wolverhampton) and myself (Oxford) in a well attended hot topic session on emotion regulation. Paul talked about research that he conducted together with colleagues from the University of Bangor looking at the role of anger regulation in physical performance. Andy, in another sport related presentation, talked about emotion regulation in cyclists and how his findings indicate that emotion regulation during physical exercise is effortful. Both Andy and Paul are planning to put their actual presentations on the EROS website in the near future, so stay tuned. You will be able to see and hear them talking about their research! In a third EROS presentation during this hot topic session, I talked about our research with romantic couples and specifically about the early findings of a recent study on which much of our project research will be based. This research used time-dependent observational and diary measures to study interpersonal emotional experience and emotion regulation and their effects on appraisals in romantic partners discussing worries related to their young children. Because we asked participants to look back over video material from their interactions in the lab and make ratings at 10 second intervals (video-cued recall procedure), we got repeated ratings of their actual and perceived emotions and attempts at emotion regulation. Our findings seem to indicate that although overall partners’ level of experienced and perceived worry was significantly related, there was great variance between couples (that is some couples could correctly identify each others’ level of worry while others were quite unaware of their partners’ feelings) and that similarly, partners varied greatly in how well they could identify regulation attempts. It further does appear that those participants who were aware of their partner’s (lack of) attempts at emotion regulation were better at detecting their partner’s true levels of experienced emotion (and act accordingly) than those who were not. In my talk I also looked forward to analyses we are currently running on the video-cued recall data to examine the reciprocal patterns of emotional influence we expect to find in the data. For example, we hope to answer the question whether a certain level of worry expressed by one partner is typically followed by an attempt at worry reduction by the other?
On the second conference day, Brian Parkinson (Oxford) delivered a key note entitled ‘How Our Emotions Affect Others: Relation alignment and appraisal communication’. He talked about how our own emotions affect other people’s appraisals and emotions and the role of interpersonal emotion regulation in this. He discussed how certain emotions (e.g. embarrassment, anger, guilt) are oriented to their effects on other people and gave examples from recent studies. Brian finished his talk with a discussion of the processes of affective interpersonal influence. He includes active interpersonal regulation as an explicit process aimed at influencing the targets emotions amongst these (A person trying to increase the level of worry experienced by his or her partner regarding a certain issue by enhancing their expression of worry is an example of this).
Thom Webb (Sheffield University) was the EROS member to give the very last talk of the conference (literally at 4.45pm on the Saturday afternoon!). In his presentation he talked about research he has conducted with EROS colleagues from both Sheffield and Manchester, looking at how we can overcome the effect of mood (both positive and negative) on risky and impulsive behaviour. Strategies they examined were the formation of implementation intentions (so-called if-then plans) directed at controlling (regulating) either experienced mood or the actual risky behaviour. Both seem to work in avoiding the detrimental effect of mood on risk taking.
Other highlights of the conference for me were an interesting key note talk by Keith Oatley and some excellent talks as part of the symposium on the social determinants of affective experiences in couples’ daily life and some of the talks in the Emotion in social interaction symposium. The conference also gave us a chance to catch up with some of the EROS advisors and hear about their current research.
And of course there was excellent conference food and all the delights that Leuven had to offer the hungry and thirsty conference attendants which went a long way to regulate my mood and made a good experience even more pleasant!
So overall an excellent conference with a substantial EROS contribution! And members of the EROS consortium will be presenting their research again at the BPS social section conference in Sheffield this September (http://www.socialpsychologyuk.net/conferences.html). We have our own symposium entitled ‘Variability in emotion regulation of others and self’ (Convenor: Karen Niven Sheffield) as well as several independent presentations. So I am pretty sure that we will see a report on that conference soon!
That is it for now from Oxford!
Gwenda Simons
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