Jo Bower and Dr Barney Dunn - Connecting with positive experience: the role of dampening in depression

Intuitively, it seems advantageous to enhance and prolong positive feelings, whilst minimising the impact of distressing or unpleasant situations. This process of emotion regulation is essential to our mental health. An inability to effectively regulate positive feelings has been shown to contribute to depression, mania and other emotional disorders. Despite its importance, there is a paucity of studies investigating the regulation of positive affect. This think talk will present talks from two research groups examining this issue Barney Dunn from the MDC will present work examining how a positive dampening appraisal style (e.g. think “this is too good to last” when feeling happy) impacts on positive emotion experience. Jo Bower from University of Reading will present work examining whether responses to instructed positive emotion regulation is related to trait mood and laboratory reactivity to positivity stimuli. There will be time at the end for discussion of similarities and differences in research approach and findings and hopefully to establish collaborative research agendas going forwards.