The overarching goal of my research is to understand the factors that enable people to adaptively regulate impulses and emotions that undermine their goals and compromise their health.

In this vein, my research to date has focused on attempting to resolve a key paradox in the coping literature. On the one hand, substantial evidence suggests that in order to adaptively “work through” negative experiences it is helpful to analyze and understand one’s feelings. On the other hand, people’s attempts to do this are often counterproductive leading to rumination and/or avoidance. My research addresses this paradox by taking an integrative approach, using measures and methods at multiple levels of analysis (e.g., behavioral, physiological, neuroscience-fMRI) to shed light on the mechanisms that distinguish adaptive and maladaptive forms of emotional processing among diverse populations (e.g., normal healthy adults, clinical populations, children), and examine how knowledge of such basic mechanisms can be used to facilitate coping in everyday life.