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Project

The nature and determinants of emotional recovery in normal and depressive populations.

Emotions are dynamic processes that change over time. As such, a full theoretical understanding of them can only be reached provided a proper account of their time-related characteristics. One such characteristic is emotion duration. Besides being theoretically relevant, understanding emotion duration is also needed from a clinical perspective, as many psychological disorders are typified by prolonged emotions (e.g., depression) and as long negative emotions can be at the basis of cardiovascular diseases. A proper account of emotion duration requires a sharp definition of the end point of an emotion. This implies a major challenge. At first sight, one may wonder what this challenge is about as one may simply consider an emotion to end when it is no longer felt. However, someone may indicate to feel no longer an emotion while other (e.g., biological) parameters suggest otherwise. Moreover, it may be that all emotion parameters returned to baseline but that, when being confronted with the eliciting event later on (e.g., seeing a picture of a lost child), the emotion may reappear, evidencing a lack of recovery. In this project, we aim to get a better understanding of emotion duration by taking the complexity of the end of emotions into account. For this purpose, we plan to (a) chart and structure a broad range of indicators of recovery, (b) identify factors that influence recovery speed, and (c) chart and explain recovery problems that show up in depressed populations.
Date:1 Oct 2012 →  30 Sep 2017
Keywords:Duration, Neurophysiology, Recovery, Regulation, Depression, Dynamics, Emotion
Disciplines:Animal experimental and comparative psychology, Applied psychology, Human experimental psychology