Emotional health and regulation play a critical role in physical well-being, as highlighted by the American Heart Association Mind-Heart-Body Connection statement. This project aims to improve understanding of the relationship between emotions and heart health and investigate the ability of emotion regulation interventions to improve cardiac functioning and recovery.
This research program is interested in questions like: What is the relationship between emotion regulation and cardiac health? Can brief emotion regulation interventions improve recovery after cardiac events? Who and what do different emotion regulation strategies help?
The ability to regulate how you express your emotions is a key ingredient for social success. For example, following social display rules like hiding your feelings of anger towards your boss or putting on a polite smile to greet someone can help you navigate social situations with ease. However, this type of regulation can come at a significant cost to personal wellbeing.
This research program is interested in questions like: What are the causes and consequences of individual variation in display rules? How do display rules influence communication in healthcare settings? What is the role of display rules in clinical conditions such as social anxiety? How do display rules influence cross-cultural communication (e.g., immigrant wellbeing)? And how do display rules develop across childhood?
Funding: Dawel, A. (2022). ANU College of Health and Medicine TRANSFORM Career Development Fellowship, Emotion regulation and mental health.
Virtual humans—like the one shown on the left—are rapidly infiltrating our online social worlds. This project aims to advance understanding of human emotional communication and improve human rapport with virtual humans and avatars.
This research program is interested in questions like: What social roles can virtual beings successfully fulfil? How do human responses differ for virtual compared to human faces? What physical information in faces causes expressions to be perceived as genuinely emotional? Is this information the same for virtual as for human faces?
The program also includes a specific focus on AI faces, asking questions like: How do AI faces differ from human faces? Can people detect AI faces, and do they have insight into this ability? How do training biases in algorithms affect AI faces? How does psychological theory help us understand AI faces and AI face perception?
Funding: Palermo, R., ****Dawel, A., Sutherland, C., Bell, J., & Krumhuber, E. (2022-2025). ARC Discovery Project, Reading facial expressions from real and virtual humans.