TESC Colloquium – Elise Kalokerinos

‘Regulating, predicting, and mapping our everyday emotions’

By Elise Kalokerinos, University of Melbourne

Emotions color our most important moments—pride at a hard-fought win, anger at an injustice, or gratitude towards a friend—and our more routine daily events—irritation at a colleague’s loud talking, boredom during a long meeting, or amusement at a favorite TV show. Emotions are central to our everyday lives, and experience-sampling methods (ESM) are ideally placed to capture this richness. In this talk, I will discuss two lines of research that leverage the unique benefits of ESM in understanding our emotional world. First, I will discuss research investigating how often people regulate their emotions in response to stressors in everyday life. We find that spontaneous real-world emotion regulation is relatively rare, suggesting that rather than focusing on how people regulate their emotions, researchers should begin by investigating whether people choose to regulate their emotions at all. Second, outside the lab, people have knowledge and understanding of what might happen next, and this knowledge could be leveraged to shape real-world regulation and coping. I will discuss research investigating whether the ways in which we anticipate, predict, and forecast our future emotions can shape outcomes. Finally, I discuss a challenge for ESM emotion research – tackling questions at scale, and with large sample sizes. I will introduce our platform EMOTE, an open-access research platform that is intended to enable sharing and reanalysis of ESM data across many datasets.

Bio: Dr Elise Kalokerinos is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, where she co-directs the Functions of Emotions in Everyday Life (FEEL) Lab. She completed her PhD in social psychology at the University of Queensland, a Marie Curie fellowship at KU Leuven in Belgium, and an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award fellowship at the University of Melbourne. Her research centres on emotion, motivation, and self-regulation.

Elise will present online via Teams from Melbourne. You have the choice to participate online from the pavilion at Tilburg University or from your own laptop. Please indicate this in the registration form.