Hooria Jazaieri

Santa Clara University | SCU · Leavey School of Business

Mind wandering, or the tendency for attention to drift to task-irrelevant thoughts, has been associated with worse intra- and inter-personal functioning. Utilizing daily experience sampling with 51 adults during 9-weeks of a compassion meditation program, we examined effects on mind wandering (to neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant topics) and caring...

A growing literature has begun to document the effects of compassion training on a variety of important interpersonal behaviors (e.g., helping behavior). What is not yet well understood, however, is what impact compassion training has on affect and affect regulation. To examine this issue, we implemented a 9-week compassion training program in whic...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to make the case for bringing compassion to students in educational settings, preschool through graduate school (PK-20). Design/methodology/approach First, the author defines what is meant by “compassion” and differentiates it from the related constructs. Next, the author discusses the importance of bringing...

Relational sense of community (SOC) research suggests that SOC depends on the depth of relationships cultivated between members over time. The rise of temporary organizations, representing transient work arrangements with limited expectations for future interactions, implored us to consider: how can a swift SOC emerge in temporary organizations, wh...

In difficult times, how can we alleviate employees’ distress? Lay beliefs suggest that high-quality compassionate responses come from those who have “been there” before. According to hot-cold empathy gap theory, however, firsthand experience with another’s distress may activate distorted memories of past distress, leading people to underestimate th...

While prominent measures of hope are largely cognitive in nature, many scholars and laypeople view hope primarily as an emotion. Although Snyder’s Elaborated Hope Theory attempts to theoretically balance these two perspectives, no measure yet exists of hope as a purely emotional process, only as a cognitive process. Overlooking the emotional featur...

Although lay beliefs about hope have been studied extensively in college student populations, little is known about how working professionals understand hope. Accordingly, the present study examined lay beliefs about hope among healthcare workers through the prism of two prominent models of hope. A directed content analysis of healthcare profession...

Humans have a fundamental need to belong and to be a part of a community, yet it is said that we are currently living in an “age of loneliness” plagued by isolation, fragmentation, and social disconnection. The changing nature of work offers limited opportunity to create the social glue that binds us together, and thus exacerbates social disconnect...

While competitive situations such as negotiations are usually thought to involve some level of deception, the use of deception is inconsistent across negotiators. In this chapter, we examine the various paradigms, dependent variables, and situational moderators surrounding deception in negotiations – paying particular attention to the unique role o...

There is increasing interest in third-wave interventions that incorporate contemplative practices. Mindfulness and compassion meditation training programs have shown great promise. In the spirit of precision health, a refined understanding of participant features that identify who will and will not benefit from specific types of contemplative train...

Our world is faced with complex challenges that include poverty, hunger, lack of education, gender inequality, sustainability, and climate change. These issues cannot be addressed by government action alone and requires the business world play an important role. Despite the many effort of companies to address social responsibility in the last decad...

This chapter examines cognitive processes that underlie the development of emotion dysregulation. It first introduces and defines key terms including emotion, emotion regulation, and emotion dysregulation. It then introduces the authors' theoretical perspective, the extended process model of emotion regulation, which considers emotion generation an...

In this paper we examined the content, structure, and dynamics of reputation, a person’s agreed-upon character that is constructed within social groups. In Study 1, we examined longitudinally the content and structure of an individual’s reputation as distributed across a newly forming group. In Study 2, we examined how the dynamics of reputation sh...

Common factors are understood to play an important role in many therapeutic interventions. What is not yet clear is whether the relative importance of common factors in therapeutic interventions varies as a function of treatment type and/or disorder. In this study, we were specifically interested in the common factor of working alliance. We randomi...

Compassion is a powerful feature of human experience and is a key component of individual, interpersonal, organizational and societal well-being. It is a fundamental skill that can be trained. Cultivating compassion may contribute to sustained well-being in individuals, groups, and organizations. There is now a growing scientific and clinical inter...

Objective: To investigate treatment outcome and mediators of Cognitive-Behavioral Group Therapy (CBGT) vs. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) vs. Waitlist (WL) in patients with generalized social anxiety disorder (SAD). Method: 108 unmedicated patients (55.6% female; mean age = 32.7, SD = 8.0; 43.5% Caucasian, 39% Asian, 9.3% Hispanic, 8.3%...

We examined whether cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) would influence the relationship between two distinct forms of emotion regulation (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) and satisfaction with life in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD). When compared to healthy adults (n = 42) at baseline (Study 1), patients with SAD (n =...

We begin this chapter by defining mindfulness and giving a brief historical overview for contextual purposes. In defining mindfulness, we focus on three core elements – intention, attention, and attitude. In the next section of the chapter, we review the empirical literature – which highlights the link between mindfulness as a state, trait, and pra...

Mental health, once defined in terms of absence of illness, has gradually become understood in a more holistic way, which includes the positive qualities that help people flourish. This evolving definition of mental health has led to an exploration of other traditions and practices, including mindfulness meditation, which for thousands of years hav...

It is widely agreed that emotion regulation plays an important role in many psychological disorders. We make the case that emotion regulation is in fact a key transdiagnostic factor, using the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) as an organizing framework. In particular, we first consider how transdiagnostic and RDoC approaches have extended categorica...

Objective: The goal of this study was to investigate treatment outcome and mediators of cognitive-behavioral group therapy (CBGT) versus mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) versus waitlist (WL) in patients with generalized social anxiety disorder (SAD). Method: One hundred eight unmedicated patients (55.6% female; mean age = 32.7 years, SD...

Objectives: Many teachers report high levels of job-related stress. Successful outcomes in stress-management trainings depend on participants actively engaging in skill-building exercises. However, despite good intentions to engage in such exercises on a regular basis, many participants ultimately fail to do so. The present study seeks to understan...

Background and objectives: Difficulties with attentional control have long been thought to play a key role in anxiety and depressive disorders. However, the nature and extent of attentional control difficulties in social anxiety disorder (SAD) are not yet well understood. The current study was designed to assess whether attentional control for non...

We examined whether social anxiety severity at pre-treatment would moderate the impact of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) or aerobic exercise (AE) for generalized social anxiety disorder. MBSR and AE produced equivalent reductions in weekly social anxiety symptoms. Improvements were moderated by pre-treatment social anxiety severity. Mind...

Many psychiatric disorders involve problematic patterns of emotional reactivity and regulation. In this review, we consider recent findings regarding emotion and emotion regulation in the context of social anxiety disorder (SAD). We first describe key features of SAD which suggest altered emotional and self-related processing difficulties. Next, we...

Individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) suffer from intense fear of social evaluation, heightened emotional reactivity to social cues, and problems implementing effective forms of emotion regulation (ER), particularly in social situations. In this chapter, we examine the role of emotion and ER in SAD to elucidate how different families of ER...

Despite strong support for the efficacy of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD), little is known about mechanisms of change in treatment. Within the context of a randomized controlled trial of CBT, this study examined patients' beliefs about the fixed versus malleable nature of anxiety-their 'implicit theories'-as a...

Recently, internet-based interventions have been proposed as effective treatments for people with panic disorder (PD). However, little is known about the clinical effects of integrating mobile technology into these interventions. Because users carry their smartphones with them throughout the day, we hypothesize that this technology can be used to s...

Objective There is growing interest in the role of transdiagnostic processes in the onset, maintenance, and treatment of mental disorders (Nolen-Hoeksema & Watkins, 2011). Two such transdiagnostic processes–rumination and reappraisal–are the focus of the present study. The main objective was to examine the roles of rumination (thought to be harmful...

Many psychiatric disorders are widely thought to involve problematic patterns of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation. Unfortunately, it has proven far easier to assert the centrality of “emotion dysregulation” than to rigorously document the ways in which individuals with various forms of psychopathology differ from healthy individuals in t...

There has been a increasing interest in understanding emotion regulation deficits in social anxiety disorder (SAD; e.g., Hofmann, Sawyer, Fang, & Asnaani, 2012). However, much remains to be understood about the patterns of associations among regulation strategies in the repertoire. Doing so is important in light of the growing recognition that peop...

Dysfunctional beliefs play an important role in the aetiology and maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Despite this—and the heightened salience of emotion in SAD—little is known about SAD patients' beliefs about whether emotions can be influenced or changed. The current study examined these emotion beliefs in patients with SAD and in non-c...

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is thought to involve deficits in emotion regulation, and more specifically, deficits in cognitive reappraisal. However, evidence for such deficits is mixed. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal, we examined reappraisal-related behavioral and neural responses...

People differ in their implicit beliefs about emotions. Some believe emotions are fixed (entity theorists), whereas others believe that everyone can learn to change their emotions (incremental theorists). We extend the prior literature by demonstrating (a) entity beliefs are associated with lower well-being and increased psychological distress, (b)...

Importance Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD) is thought to enhance cognitive reappraisal in patients with SAD. Such improvements should be evident in cognitive reappraisal–related prefrontal cortex responses.Objective To determine whether CBT for SAD modifies cognitive reappraisal–related prefrontal cortex neura...

It is widely thought that many psychological disorders involve emotion dysregulation. However, it is not yet clear just how many of the disorders presented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV-Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) are formally characterized by emotion regulation difficulties and related affective disturbances. To add...

Social anxiety disorder is thought to be characterized by maladaptive self-views. This study investigated whether (a) patients with social anxiety disorder (n = 75) differ at baseline from healthy controls (n = 43) in negative and positive self-views, (b) cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for social anxiety disorder versus wait-list control produc...

Compassion is a positive orientation towards suffering that may be enhanced through compassion training and is thought to influence psychological functioning. However, the effects of compassion training on mindfulness, affect, and emotion regulation are not known. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in which 100 adults from the community wer...

Background Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is widely thought to be characterized by heightened behavioral and limbic reactivity to socio-emotional stimuli. However, although behavioral findings are clear, neural findings are surprisingly mixed. Methods Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined behavioral and brain responses in...

Peak XYZ Talairach Coordinates for the Left and Right Insula, as Defined by Kurth’s Meta Analysis [22].

Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by distorted self-views. The goal of this study was to examine whether mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) alters behavioral and brain measures of negative and positive self-views. Methods: Fifty-six adult patients with generalized SAD were randomly assigned to MBSR or a comparison ae...

Previous research has demonstrated that mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) improves psychological functioning in multiple domains. However, to date, no studies have examined the effects of MBSR on moral reasoning and decision making. This single group design study examined the effect of MBSR on moral reasoning and ethical decision making, mi...

Psychosocial interventions often aim to alleviate negative emotional states. However, there is growing interest in cultivating positive emotional states and qualities. One particular target is compassion, but it is not yet clear whether compassion can be trained. A community sample of 100 adults were randomly assigned to a 9-week compassion cultiva...

Effective treatments for social anxiety disorder (SAD) exist, but additional treatment options are needed for nonresponders as well as those who are either unable or unwilling to engage in traditional treatments. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is one nontraditional treatment that has demonstrated efficacy in treating other mood and anxie...

Objective: To examine whether changes in cognitive reappraisal self-efficacy (CR-SE) mediate the effects of individually administered cognitive-behavioral therapy (I-CBT) for social anxiety disorder (SAD) on severity of social anxiety symptoms. Method: A randomized controlled trial in which 75 adult patients (21-55 years of age; 53% male; 57% Ca...

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is thought to reduce emotional reactivity and enhance emotion regulation in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD). The goal of this study was to examine the neural correlates of deploying attention to regulate responses to negative self-beliefs using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants...

Self-compassion refers to having an accepting and caring orientation towards oneself. Although self-compassion has been studied primarily in healthy populations, one particularly compelling clinical context in which to examine self-compassion is social anxiety disorder (SAD). SAD is characterized by high levels of negative self-criticism as well as...

This groundbreaking primer illuminates contemplative methods that can improve mental and physical health. Contemplative practices, from meditation to Zen, are growing in popularity as methods to inspire physical and mental health. Contemplative Practices in Action: Spirituality, Meditation, and Health offers readers an introduction to these practic...