Shaping affect regulation: from trait influences to learning experiences

Abstract

The ability to influence how we feel – affect regulation – is a fundamental psychological process essential for everyday functioning and maintaining well-being. To ultimately develop interventions for improving affect regulation abilities, research investigating the diverse influences that determine individual variability in affect regulation are needed. I focus on two forms of affect regulation of particular importance for mental health outcomes and goal-driven behavior – the downregulation of negative affect and the upregulation of motivation. I approach this challenge by examining how trait factors predict affect regulation outcomes and how affect relation may be learned over time. More specifically, in Chapter 2 I investigate how beliefs about motivation relate to goal-oriented behavior, reward experiences, and motivation regulation through the development of a novel self-report questionnaire. In Chapter 3, I demonstrate that individuals can learn to use motivation regulation strategies to engage brain activity in the VTA (a region critically involved in motivated behavior), when presented with real-time fMRI neurofeedback, and characterize a functional brain network that underlies this process. In Chapter 4, I investigate how trait intolerance of uncertainty influences situational appraisals and coping behaviors to predict anxiety about the COVID-19 pandemic. And lastly in Chapter 5, I reviewed evidence for learning in emotion regulation and proposed a novel conceptual model for investigating how specific learning processes may support components of the emotion regulation process to produce learned changes in regulatory behavior. Collectively, this body of work demonstrates specific ways that affect regulation is shaped through trait characteristics and learning experiences.