James J. Gross's research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

Publications (686)

Article
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Well-being consists of several different dimensions, such as hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. However, peace of mind (PoM)-an aspect of well-being characterized by internal peace and harmony-has only recently begun to receive attention. It has been shown that PoM predicts important outcomes, such as depression and anxiety. An open question is wha...
Preprint
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Having people around, especially if they provide social support, often leads to positive outcomes both physically and mentally. Social support is especially beneficial when it comes from a loved one or romantic partner. In these studies, we aim to expand the understanding of how the presence of one’s romantic partner affects emotion regulation in p...
Article
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Research has suggested an increase in loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, but much of this work has been cross-sectional, making causal inferences difficult. In the present research, we employed a longitudinal design to identify loneliness trajectories within a period of twelve months during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium (N = 2106). We were...
Preprint
In intergroup conflicts, emotion regulation interventions can decrease negative intergroup emotions and increase support for concessions. However, it is usually infeasible to provide emotion regulation interventions to everyone in a population of interest. This raises a “spill over” question about the relationship between the proportion of individu...
Article
Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4, Google's Bard or Meta's LLaMa, have created unprecedented opportunities for analysing and generating language data on a massive scale. Because language data have a central role in all areas of psychology, this new technology has the potential to transform the field. In this Perspective, we revie...
Article
Over the past few decades, emotion regulation research has matured into a vibrant and rapidly growing field (in 2022 alone, more than 30 thousand papers were published on emotion regulation). Taking stock of our progress, we ask “What does the future hold?” In this manuscript, we offer a roadmap for the next generation of research on emotion regula...
Method
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The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-Short Form (ERQ-S; Preece, Petrova, Mehta, & Gross, 2023) is a 6-item self-report measure of two common emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal (i.e., changing the way one is thinking about a situation in order to change its emotional impact) and expressive suppression (i.e., inhibiting behavioral e...
Preprint
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People are highly motivated to change their behavior. Unfortunately, many people have difficulty doing so. Building on recent theorizing, we propose that having access to a wide range of strategies – that is, a larger strategy repertoire – can help people achieve their goals. In eight samples across a variety of domains, participants (Ntotal = 2,34...
Article
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The many stressors associated with teaching can take a toll, resulting in high levels of burnout among teachers and reduced motivation and academic performance among students. This is especially true in the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Despite the efficacy of emotion regulation interventions in pedag...
Article
Since the 1970s, psychoanalytic conceptualizations of alexithymia have defined the trait as having four core facets: difficulties identifying feelings (DIF), difficulties describing feelings (DDF), externally orientated thinking (EOT), and constricted imaginal processes. However, there is ongoing controversy about whether constricted imaginal proce...
Article
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Affective scientists traditionally have focused on periods of active wakefulness when people are responding to external stimuli or engaging in specific tasks. However, we live much of our lives immersed in experiences not related to the current environment or tasks at hand—mind-wandering (or daydreaming) during wakefulness and dreaming during sleep...
Article
Background: Emotion regulation plays a crucial role in affective functioning. One of the most commonly used measures of emotion regulation is the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), a 10-item self-report measure assessing frequency of use of two common emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. In this stu...
Article
To regulate others' emotions effectively we must learn about the efficacy of our regulation attempts. Deciding whether we made someone else feel better involves a causal judgment about the effect of our intervention on their emotional state. The current study examined whether, like other causal judgments, beliefs about emotion regulation efficacy a...
Article
Emotion regulation (ER) involves both a goal (e.g., to feel less emotion) and a strategy (e.g., reappraisal). To clarify the impact of ER goals on emotional responding, we conducted a within-participant study (N = 156) in which we held the strategy constant (reappraisal) to isolate the impact of regulation goals. We compared the impact of a quantit...
Article
Background: Emotional competencies (i.e., understanding emotions in self and others) are crucial for psychological well-being and successful social interaction. However, despite the deficits in psychological well-being and social interaction among individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), emotional competencies have not been broadly investigated in...
Article
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Teachers experience and express various emotions of different qualities and intensities. They also adopt emotion regulation strategies to increase teaching effectiveness and maintain professionalism. Previous reviews of teachers’ emotion regulation have focused on their emotional labor (i.e., deep and surface acting)—a subdimension of emotion regul...
Article
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People’s beliefs about emotions contribute to their psychological wellbeing, and two important beliefs about emotions concern their controllability and usefulness. Recently, the Emotion Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) was developed to assess beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of positive and negative emotions. To date, most psychometric s...
Article
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Parental burnout (PB) is a pervasive phenomenon. Parenting is embedded in cultural values, and previous research has shown the role of individualism in PB. In this paper, we reanalyze previously collected data to identify profiles based on the four dimensions of PB, and explore whether these profiles vary across countries’ levels of collectivistic-...
Article
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Objective: Alexithymia is a trait defined by difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, as well as externally oriented thinking. It is an important transdiagnostic risk factor for a range of psychopathologies, and therefore its assessment is of substantial interest. Recently, the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ) was developed to try to...
Article
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Background Dissociation is a ubiquitous clinical phenomenon. Dissociative disorders (DD) are primarily characterized by dissociation, and dissociative states are also a criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociative reactions (e.g., depersonalization/derealizat...
Article
Background Introductory psychology courses provide a unique opportunity to educate students in ways that can inform how they will address major issues of the day. Objective: We tested whether an integrative, last-day-of-class activity in which students applied pertinent psychological theories to climate change would empower students to address this...
Article
Full-text available
Alexithymia refers to difficulties identifying and describing one's emotions. Growing evidence suggests that alexithymia is a key transdiagnostic risk factor. Despite its clinical importance, the etiology of alexithymia is largely unknown. The present study employs meta-analytic methods to summarize findings on the role of one hypothesized antecede...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Sleep bruxism (SB) is an oral behavior that is characterized by high levels of repetitive jaw muscle activity and may develop into a disorder. The etiology of SB is not well understood, and there is currently no curative treatment for SB. Several studies have suggested associations between SB and maladaptive emotion regulation (ER). OBJ...
Article
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Purpose The prevalence of parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children, varies dramatically across countries and is highest in Western countries characterized by high individualism. Method In this study, we examined the mediators of the relationship between individualism measured at the country level and...
Article
Full-text available
Background Sleep bruxism (SB) is an oral behavior characterized by high levels of repetitive jaw muscle activity during sleep, leading to teeth grinding and clenching, and may develop into a disorder. Despite its prevalence and negative outcomes on oral health and quality of life, there is currently no cure for SB. The etiology of SB remains poorly...
Article
Full-text available
Reappraisal is a frequently used and often successful emotion regulation strategy. However, its underlying cognitive mechanisms are not well understood. In this paper, we seek to clarify these mechanisms by expanding upon our recently proposed reAppraisal framework. According to this framework, reappraisal consists of appraisal shifts that arise fr...
Article
It has long been thought that links between affect and sleep are bidirectional. However, few studies have directly assessed the relationships between: (1) pre-sleep affect and sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) activity; and (2) sleep EEG activity and post-sleep affect. This study aims to systematically explore the correlations between pre-/post-slee...
Method
Full-text available
The Persian (Farsi) version of the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire (PAQ)‬: copy of the questionnaire and scoring instructions.
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Dissociation is a ubiquitous clinical phenomenon. Dissociative disorders (DD) are primarily characterized by dissociation, and dissociative states are also a criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociative reactions across diagnostic categories are be...
Preprint
Full-text available
People’s beliefs about emotions contribute to their psychological wellbeing, and two important beliefs about emotions concern their controllability and usefulness. Recently, the Emotion Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) was developed to assess beliefs about the controllability and usefulness of positive and negative emotions. To date, most psychometric s...
Method
Full-text available
The Persian (Farsi) version of the Emotion Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ)‬: copy of the questionnaire and scoring instructions
Preprint
Introduction: Dissociation is a ubiquitous clinical phenomenon. Dissociative disorders (DD) are primarily characterized by dissociation, and dissociative states are also a criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and the dissociative subtype of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dissociative reactions such as depersonalization/dereal...
Article
Full-text available
Background: There has been steadily increasing use of bilateral mastectomy (BMX) in the treatment of primary breast cancer (BC). In this study, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the influence of emotion regulation on the decision of newly diagnosed BC patients to choose BMX rather than non-BMX treatments. Methods...
Article
Full-text available
Emotion regulation strategies such as rumination and suppression have been consistently associated with distress and psychopathology. However, it is not yet known why people engage in maladaptive strategies instead of adaptive strategies despite their negative consequences. Beliefs about emotion have been theorized to influence which emotion regula...
Preprint
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s Bard, have created unprecedented opportunities for analyzing and generating language data on a massive scale. Because language is core to all areas of psychology, this new technology holds the potential to transform the field. In this Review, we first present emerging applications of...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose: Negotiation is a consequential activity that can exacerbate power differentials, especially for women. While traditional contexts can prime stereotypical gender roles and promote conditions that lead to performance differences, these can be mitigated by context shifts. This proof-of-concept study explores whether an easy-to-apply context...
Preprint
Political segregation is a pressing social issue, particularly on social media platforms. Previous re-search suggests that one driver of online segregation is political homophily, people’s preference for others who share their political views. Here we tested the idea that another driver of online segrega-tion is political acrophily, people’s prefer...
Chapter
Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...
Preprint
It has long been thought that links between affect and sleep are bidirectional. However, few studies have directly assessed the relationships between (1) pre-sleep affect and sleep EEG activity, and (2) sleep EEG activity and post-sleep affect. This study aims to systematically explore the correlations between pre-/post-sleep affect and EEG activit...
Preprint
One foundational distinction in affective science is between emotion reactivity and regulation. This conceptual distinction has long been assumed to be instantiated in spatially separable brain systems (e.g., amygdala/insula for reactivity and frontoparietal areas for regulation). In five studies involving healthy and clinical samples (total n=336)...
Preprint
Background: There has been steadily increasing use of bilateral mastectomy (BMX) in the treatment of primary breast cancer (BC). In this study, we utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the influence of emotion regulation on the decision of newly diagnosed BC patients to choose BMX rather than non-BMX treatments. Methods:...
Article
Background Mental health difficulties among university students have been rising rapidly over the last decade, and the demand for university mental health services commonly far exceeds available resources. Digital interventions are seen as one potential solution to these challenges. However, as in other mental health contexts, digital programs ofte...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Mental health difficulties among university students have been rising rapidly over the last decade, and the demand for university mental health services commonly far exceeds available resources. Digital interventions are seen as one potential solution to these challenges. However, as in other mental health contexts, digital programmes of...
Article
Full-text available
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...
Article
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How to model the processes involved in regulating emotions via reappraisal? In two studies, we tested whether reappraisal impacts emotions through shifts along appraisal dimensions. In a first experimental study, 437 students imagined reliving a recent distressing event and rated their appraisals and emotions before and after using reappraisal to f...
Article
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Background: Neuroscience research has generally studied emotions each taken in isolation. However, mixed emotional states (e.g., the co-occurrence of amusement and disgust, or sadness and pleasure) are common in everyday life. Psychophysiological and behavioral evidence suggests that mixed emotions may have response profiles that are distinguishab...
Article
Background: More than one-third of university students meet diagnostic criteria for a mental disorder, and three quarters experience role impairment in some aspect of their life. One determinant of whether young adults will experience mental health difficulties is their ability to regulate emotion. We conducted two pilot trials of a brief online pr...
Article
Pre-sleep affect is thought to influence sleep, but associations with both sleep architecture and the electroencephalographic (EEG) power spectrum are mixed. In this pre-registered study, we assessed negative valence and arousal 1 h pre-sleep in 52 adults drawn from the community, then recorded one night of polysomnography (PSG) in participants’ ow...
Article
Background: Inclusion of self-reported and capacity-based measures may help to further elucidate the interactive link between how people think and move. Objective: To characterize the relationship between self-reported factors of physical function and pain with objective physical capacity measures. Design: Cross-sectional study of 328 adults w...
Method
Full-text available
The Persian (Farsi) version of the Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI)‬: copy of questionnaire and scoring instructions
Article
Full-text available
Objective A critical factor for adaptive psychological functioning is the ability to successfully regulate negative and positive emotions. Various tools and methods have been developed to assess emotion regulation competence. Recently, the Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI) was developed to overcome some of the limitations of pre...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Mental health difficulties among university students have been rising rapidly over the last decade, and the demand for university mental health services commonly far exceeds available resources. Digital interventions are seen as one potential solution to these challenges. However, as in other mental health contexts, digital programmes of...
Article
Full-text available
Why do so many people fail to manage their emotions successfully even though they can do so? This review begins by noting a surprising gap between emotion regulation ability and achievement apparent across individuals with emotional disorders, many of whom appear to be able to effectively regulate emotions when cued. Recently, clinical science has...
Article
Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport. Despite recognition that such performance depends on a range of cognitive factors, how common these factors are across performance domains remains unclear. The current study sought to int...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Alexithymia is a trait characterized by difficulties identifying feelings, difficulties describing feelings, and externally orientated thinking. It is widely regarded as an important transdiagnostic risk factor for a range of psychopathologies, including depressive and anxiety disorders. Whilst several well-validated psychometric measur...
Method
Full-text available
The Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire-Short Form (PAQ-S) is a 6-item self-report measure of alexithymia (i.e., difficulties identifying one's own feelings, difficulties describing feelings, and externally orientated thinking). It was designed to provide a brief and robust alexithymia assessment tool for quick administration in research and clinical s...
Article
Full-text available
What is it to be “an ideal parent”? Does the answer differ across countries and social classes? To answer these questions in a way that minimizes bias and ethnocentrism, we used open-ended questions to explore ideal-parent beliefs among 8,357 mothers and 3,517 fathers from 37 countries. Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis was utilized to first det...
Article
Stimuli such as surprised faces are ambiguous in that they are associated with both positive and negative outcomes. Interestingly, people differ reliably in whether they evaluate these and other ambiguous stimuli as positive or negative, and we have argued that a positive evaluation relies in part on a biasing of the appraisal processes via reappra...
Article
Full-text available
Unlabelled: Previous studies have demonstrated the influence of affective states on unhealthy eating. Heightened impulsivity has also been recognized as a risk factor for unhealthy eating. The objective of the present study was to investigate the relationship between trait anxiety and unhealthy eating and to test whether cognitive instability (tra...
Article
Full-text available
The study of individual differences in emotion regulation has typically focused exclusively either on the stage of the emotion generation process at which regulation occurs or on the engagement versus disengagement orientation of the regulation efforts. We introduce a new measure that samples equally across each stage of the process model of emotio...
Article
Background: There is some evidence that sleep patterns and psychological health have worsened in the general population as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Persons with multiple sclerosis (MS) represent a particularly vulnerable population to COVID-19 infections and the effects of restrictions. The present study investigated whether insomnia and...
Article
Background: Alexithymia is a key transdiagnostic risk factor for emotion-based psychopathologies. Conceptual models specify that this is because alexithymia impairs emotion regulation. However, the extent of these putative emotion regulation impairments remains underexplored. Our aim in this study was to begin to address this gap by examining whet...
Preprint
Background: More than one third of university students meet diagnostic criteria for a mental disorder, and three quarters experience role impairment in some aspect of their life. One determinant of whether young adults will experience mental health difficulties is their ability to regulate emotion. We conducted two pilot trials of a brief online pr...
Article
Full-text available
Political segregation is an important social problem, increasing polarization and impeding effective governance. Previous work has viewed the central driver of segregation to be political homophily, the tendency to associate with others who have similar views. Here we propose that, in addition to homophily, people’s social tie decisions are driven...
Article
Objective: To evaluate the relative impact of three brief therapist-supported internet-delivered emotion regulation treatments for maladaptive anger (mindful emotion awareness [MEA], cognitive reappraisal [CR], and mindful emotion awareness + cognitive reappraisal [MEA + CR]) and to test whether baseline levels of anger pathology moderate treatmen...
Article
Objective The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted children’s mental health. All children have not been affected equally, however, and whether parental emotion socialization might buffer or exacerbate the impact of COVID-19 on children’s mental health remains an important question. Method During the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U....
Poster
Full-text available
Alexithymia is a personality trait that refers to difficulties identifying and describing one’s emotions. Growing evidence suggests that alexithymia is a key transdiagnostic risk factor. Despite its clinical importance, the etiology of alexithymia is largely unknown. The present study employs meta-analytic methods to summarize findings on the role...
Poster
Full-text available
Research has demonstrated a strong link between perceived control and academic, interpersonal, and health outcomes. Perceived control is lastingly shaped during childhood, and parenting is one of the most formative influences of that time. In the present study, we investigate the impact of parenting on subsequent levels of perceived control, specif...
Article
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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in heightened stress for families in the United States, and exposure to pandemic-related stress has been found to confer risk for mental health problems among both children and parents. To isolate risk and protective factors for children living through the ongoing pandemic, several studies have begun to examine fa...
Article
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There is a growing interest in HCI to envision, design, and evaluate technology-enabled interventions that support users’ emotion regulation. This interest stems in part from increased recognition that the ability to regulate emotions is critical to mental health, and that a lack of effective emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic factor for menta...
Article
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Hopelessness in parents has implications for parents' own well‐being as well as their ability to meet the needs of their children. In the present study, we examined the effect of maladaptive behaviors in children with autism on parental hopelessness, with particular attention to whether parental reflective functioning would moderate the effect of m...