Welcome to the Yale Positive Emotion & Psychopathology (YPEP) Lab!

We know that positive emotions motivate us to pursue important goals, savor experiences, counteract the cardiovascular effects of stress, and maintain vital social bonds. However, a relatively untouched question remains — Can positive emotions also be a source of dysfunction? Can feeling good be a predictor of negative mental health outcomes? Although work in affective science reveals critical insights regarding associated dysfunctions of negative emotion states, research has failed to delineate the nature of positive emotion disturbance using the theoretical lens and methodological tools of affective science.

Much of the work in the YPEP lab centers on people at risk for, and with a clinical history of, mania (i.e., bipolar disorder) as a means to better characterize and understand the mental health significance of extreme perturbations in positive emotion. The YPEP lab also conducts basic research on the normative function of positive emotion, including mechanisms underlying adaptive positive emotion functioning (e.g., mindfulness) as well as the behavioral and psychophysiological (e.g., RSA) markers of positive emotions. An overarching theme in this line of work involves utilizing a multi-method approach by assessing emotional functioning at experiential (e.g., self-report, narrative), behavioral (e.g., FACS), and biological (e.g., psychophysiology; and more recently, genetic and neuroimaging) levels of analysis.

Thank you for visiting!