Emotion as a dynamic system: Individual dynamics and population heterogeneity

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Emotion regulation has potent influences on multiple domains (e.g., cognitive, psychological) for adaptive human development. Adolescence provides a powerful opportunity to test and advance theories in emotion system and its regulation, as adolescents experience substantial changes at biological, cognitive, psychological, and social levels. In addition to contributing to basic knowledge on emotion and cognitive development, because adolescents are at greater risk for maladjustment and psychopathology, a rigorous understanding of the dynamics of their emotions and its regulation also has clear downstream implications for societal and health policies. Emotion and its regulation involve dynamic within-person processes happening in daily life that cannot be fully captured by conventional designs. Recent technological advances (e.g., smartphone) offer an opportunity to circumvent these obstacles and to collect data with great flexibility and convenience through innovative designs (e.g., daily diary design). Consequently, with advanced statistical modeling, I can investigate emotion as a dynamical system, to illuminate its dynamics as the emotion processes unfold continuously in daily life, and to delineate its links with cognitive and other systems. The long-term goal of this proposed research program is to study adolescent emotion dynamics at day-to-day level, particularly to capture individual-level dynamics and individual differences in daily emotion dynamics, by collecting month-long daily diary data. I aim to unravel the intrinsic dynamics of adolescent daily emotion processes, as well as external factors (e.g., parents' daily emotions) that may influence the emotion system. I will elucidate genetic and environmental origins of daily emotion dynamics by comparing the similarity in emotion dynamics between identical and fraternal twin pairs. Moreover, I will follow adolescents longitudinally over multiple years to illustrate emotion dynamics at different timescales (e.g., days vs. years), to understand its change over longer time period, and to examine its links with long-term outcomes. One major novelty of this research program is to investigate emotion as a dynamical system in real life with the application of state-of-the-art statistical modeling technique. This research program will advance our understanding of emotion dynamics at multiple timescales, and produce novel knowledge of intrinsic and extrinsic determinants of emotion dynamics in daily emotion systems. Besides the development and dissemination of advanced statistical methods, the expected outcomes may form the basis of future research with implications for societal and health policies. For example, community service organizations can incorporate research findings into service programs to target maladaptive adolescent emotion dynamics. Therefore, the research findings can potentially prevent adverse outcomes and promote well-being of adolescents, benefiting all Canadian families.