Why study mood and emotion regulation in the brain?

How do our mood and emotions affect us?

Our mood affects how we experience the world around us. It colors our thinking and can make us more or less likely to behave in certain ways. Imagine waking up in the morning feeling content and calm. You plan out your day and happily leave the house. But then you just miss your bus. This will make you late for an important meeting unless you successfully plan an alternative travel route. Planning an alternative route quickly requires a lot of mental effort and will require you to regulate your emotional response to missing the bus (e.g., maybe feeling anxious about the meeting or angry at the driver for not opening the doors).

This capacity to regulate our emotions is very useful in everyday life and we do it constantly, often without noticing. We think that differences in this capacity to regulalte emotional responses may contribute to people's vulnerability to mental health problems.

By using our app, you can help us better understand the association between mood and our capacity to regulate our emotions.

Emotional regulation changes with age.

The ability to regulate emotions improves from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. But we still know very little about how this happens. This research project will help us understand how the capacity to regulate our responses to emotional events and information changes with age.

For example, the inhibition task will help us investigate whether people's ability to ignore emotional distraction improves with age. We are also interested to find out whether these improved regulation skills lead to people feeling more positive in daily life.