Emotional reappraisal (changing the way we see a situation) and emotional suppression (inhibiting our already present emotional response) have very different effects on our feelings, relationships and wellbeing.  As a generalisation, reappraisal tends to work well, while suppression comes at higher cost.  I wrote about this last month  in a first post on James Gross's Psychophysiology Lab at Stanford . I went on, in a subsequent post, to put together a handout on reappraisal entitled Getting a better perspective.

Because there is so much interesting research being conducted at the Stanford Lab, I thought it worthwhile to write a further post mentioning some of this other work.  The webpage detailing their current research projects mentions nine different areas.  These include the following descriptions:

Last week I talked about coming across Srivastava and colleagues' paper (Srivastava, Tamir et al. 2009 - see below) on the social costs of emotional suppression.  This led me to Srivastava's lab at the University of Oregon.  It's then an easy jump to James Gross's Psychophysiology lab at Stanford University (see below).  The Stanford lab is a hive of activity with research projects in a whole series of fascinating areas  .  A key focus is work on emotion regulation - its neural basis, emotional & social consequences, and relationship with personality.  Their "process model of emotion regulation" suggests that " ...

I love it when I follow up ideas from a new research paper and then break through into a whole area of helpful knowledge that I haven't come across before.  This happened recently with the paper by Srivastava and colleagues (Srivastava, Tamir et al. 2009 - see below) on the social costs of emotional suppression.  This then linked me through to James Gross's work at Stanford, but more on that in next week's post.

Yesterday was a fairly classic first full day of one of these four day peer groups that I've been involved with for so long.  Like a musical form ... a concerto or something ... there are usual stages to the group, phases which it typically moves through.  When I wrote about this spring peer group a year ago, I used the metaphor of a cooking pot saying "so it's crucial that people feel the pot, the container of the group is safe enough, that it can hold and allow what comes up to work through without spilling over and burning anyone badly.  So part of what we're doing can be viewed as making a container that feels caring enough, safe enough, accepting enough for members of the group to explore and work on issues that may bubble up for them.  Another aspect of this cooking pot metaphor is that it's important too that it's 'on the heat', that the way we are in the group helps people get in touch with issues, pains, conflicts, experiences that it can be helpful to work on in this environment."

It's the first morning of this year's "Mixed Group" in Cumbria.  I wrote about this group in some detail when we last met up almost exactly a year ago.  Lying in bed a little earlier on, I thought over why I'm here.  I should be reasonably clear about this by now - after all the group (with varying participants) has been meeting almost every year since 1991.

I'm a big fan of self-determination theory (SDT).  I've posted before on SDT.  See, for example, the September post from last year with its links to a lecture I've given and to a number of handouts.  See too Wellbeing, time management & self-determination in the website's Good Knowledge handouts section.

I have now added a series of three questionnaires - with relevant background information - to the Good Knowledge handouts.  The questionnaires are downloaded, and reformatted, from the excellent Self-Determination website at www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT .  They are:

Basic need satisfaction scale - this 21-item scale assesses how well the three basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence & relatedness are being met. 

Here are a couple of very interesting, helpful websites that I've been reminded of recently.  They illustrate in a fun way the diversity and possibilities of the internet.

Here are a series of handouts,questionnaires and book suggestions for healthy sexuality, for sexual dysfunctions, and for abuse screening. 

Touch, sex & caring - this two page Word handout is rather dated now, but still makes a series of very valid points.

I routinely scan quite a few journals every month.  Sometimes it's disappointing and there's nothing in the issue of a particular journal that interests me much.  Sometimes a particular journal contains a bunch of stimulating articles.  January's edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was a good find.  Below are four papers from it.  The DeWall et al study is on how social exclusion leads to hostility and aggression.  It adds to the large body of research on the very powerful effects of being socially rejected.  Putting "rejection (psychology)" into the top search bar of PubMed today and clicking on "Go" pulls out 2,741 paper