Emotion System Dynamics: Regulation and Concordance across Time Scales

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Processes of emotions and their regulation as they unfold over time is at the frontier of cutting-edge models of cognition, social interactions, behaviour, genetics, and neuroscience. Dominant theory emphasizes the variability in the bottom-up assembly of physiological, behavioural, and cognitive components of the emotion systems, but empirical study has neglected (a) the processes that regulate the dynamic coherence among these emotion components and (b) the relations among these processes across different scales of time (e.g., moment-to-moment, day-to-day). Thus, the primary long-term objectives of my research program are to integrate emotion regulation processes into our understanding of emotion processes as they unfold in time and across time scales. Progress in the lab has been ramping up for a decade. We are ready to embark on our most ambitious project that brings all of the elements together. We will use mobile physiological sensing technology synchronized with a mobile phone app that captures participants' emotion processes and their regulation several times a day for two weeks. Further, we will implement a seasonal burst design, repeating this two-week protocol once a season for a year to capture change and stability across multiple time scales. A second study of adolescents and their parents will repeat this same design but add real-time measurement of physiological arousal, cognitive appraisals, expressive behaviour, and regulatory efforts during emotionally evocative tasks. This study will thus enable a vertical comparison of dynamic process on the order of seconds, minutes, days, and seasons. These innovative studies will address key gaps between theoretical interpretations and the scarcity of data that would support such conclusions. Ultimately, we will build a systems model of stability and change dynamics in emotion processes to inform basic research, developmental science, and broader theories of human behaviour. These next 5 years will support top-level training for early career researchers (post-doctoral, and graduate and undergraduate students) in the most cutting-edge techniques and opportunities to advance toward their highest aspirations. The research program provides as many opportunities as possible for those from underrepresented groups to esnure the advantages of diversity and inclusion. In the journal Nature, 64 leading scientists recently declared that we have entered the era of "affectism" (Dukes et al., 2021), persuasively demonstrating that emotions and emotion-related processes now dominate research funding and output, across a wide range of disciplines. The proposed research provides much needed knowledge to support these endeavors, while also informing a broader community of Canadian stakeholders (e.g., parents, educators) and supporting a diverse next generation of researchers to be fully prepared to meet the challenges of the future.