I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,000 abstracts. 

A couple of lines from the Bruce Springsteen song "Hungry heart" kept going through my head - "Like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going."  Something was wrong.  I couldn't work out where I'd got to on my map.  The line of pylons shouldn't have been where they were - and certainly not where they were in relation to the stream and rough track I could see across the valley. 

I'd started walking fine in the morning.  I left Edinburgh early and before 9.00am was heading out from Dalrigh on the long walk up the valley to Ben Lui.  Two hours walking saw me at the bottom of the hill.  Then a steady tramp up and into the low lying cloud. 

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.

"There's nothing so practical as a good theory".    Kurt Lewin

Just as there were research papers on depression that stood out and got me thinking last month, so too there were particular papers on psychotherapy that I found more interesting than others.