Issues of willpower & emotion regulation

My research interests focus broadly on the issues of willpower and emotion regulation. The main questions driving my research are:

1)What kinds of cognitive and attentional self-control strategies help people regulate automatically triggered thoughts and feelings that lead to maladaptive consequences (i.e. violent emotional outbursts, feelings of rejection, appetitive impulses, stereotyping)?

2)What psychological, physiological, and neural mechanisms underlie their effects?In this vein, I focus on strategies that operate to both a) immediately dampen or “cool” negative automatic responses, and b) buffer people against experiencing such maladaptive automatic responses in the future. Current projects investigate these issues on psychological, physiological, and neural levels of analysis.