RESEARCH OVERVIEW
What generates an emotion? How do we experience it, regulate it, and use it to guide our behaviour? Why does emotion regulation come easily to some people, while others struggle? And how do emotions shape cognition in return—from decision-making and social behaviour to language and memory? These questions drive our research at the Affective Neuro Lab, with a central focus on the cognitive control of emotion.
Emotion regulation—the ability to adapt emotional responses to changing circumstances—is fundamental to human behaviour, mental and physical health, and well-being. When these regulatory processes are disrupted, they are implicated across a broad range of psychological disorders. We therefore aim not only to understand how emotions are generated and controlled, but also why emotion regulation differs so substantially between individuals and across contexts.
To address these questions, we use a deliberately multimodal approach that connects brain, body, behaviour, and everyday experience. Functional and structural neuroimaging allow us to investigate the neural architecture of emotion and emotion regulation. Physiological measures—including skin conductance, heart rate, pupillometry, wearable sensors and electrogastrography—capture how emotional processes unfold in the body. Behavioural experiments reveal how emotions influence actions and decisions, while smartphone-based experience sampling allows us to study emotions as they occur in daily life. Computational modelling brings these different levels of evidence together and helps us move from describing emotional processes toward explaining and predicting them. This approach reflects the lab’s broader aim of following emotion from neural circuits to lived experience.
Our research also extends beyond emotion regulation in the individual brain. Emotions unfold within social relationships, within a changing body, and within real-world environments. We therefore study how people regulate emotions with others, how the brain represents the self and socially significant people, how hormones, stress, sleep and interoception shape emotional functioning, and how natural and built environments influence emotional experience. At the same time, we investigate the reciprocal relationship between emotion and decision-making and translate mechanistic insights into neuroscience-informed training and digital approaches to mental health.
Across these questions, our goal is to build a mechanistic and ecologically meaningful understanding of emotion: from neural networks and bodily signals to social interaction and everyday life—and ultimately from understanding mechanisms to developing better ways of supporting emotional resilience and well-being.
Our work is organised into seven interconnected research areas.
Networks & Collaborations
Our research lives in a web of national and international collaboration. We are part of CORE (Collaborative Open and Reproducible Research on Emotion Regulation), and contribute to two EU COST Actions CA23113 CliMent.