Culture, Health & Emotion Laboratory

Our lab is housed within the Psychology Department and is a part of our top-ranked Clinical Psychology Program. Research conducted in our lab has two primary foci: 1) exploring and understanding the ways in which culture influences basic emotional processes such as emotional experience and expression, emotion regulation and emotion perception, and 2) understanding the consequences of cultural variations in emotion, especially in terms of health, mental health and well-being.  We are also interested in how individuals from diverse cultures react to and prepare for stressors that occur within the individual (e.g., psychopathology and disease) as well as external stressors in the environment (e.g., discrimination and racism).

There are two important characteristics of our approach to the issues outlined above. First, in our work we subscribe to a broad definition of culture (Pedersen, 1999), which includes any or all potentially salient ethnographic, demographic, status or affiliation identities(religion, age, sexual identity, gender, race, etc.).  Second, because of their complex and multifaceted nature, we take a multi-method approach to the study of emotions. Using a state of the art psychophysiology lab, we measure emotional responses by examining physiological activity, behavioral responses and self-reported emotions. Our goal is to apply scientific rigor to the study of both culture and emotion in order to elucidate their influences on each other and on important outcomes related to health and functioning.