Changing Emotions

Dirk Hermans is Professor and the Director of the Center for the Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology at University of Leuven, Belgium. His work focuses on associative learning and fear, autobiographical memory, and the study of the automatic affective processing of stimuli.Bernard Rimé is Emeritus and Invited Professor at the University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium and is a Past President of the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) and of the Belgian Psychological Society. His research examines how emotional episodes stimulate interpersonal and collective communication as well as the consequences of sharing emotions with others. Batja Mesquita is a Professor and the Director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her work focuses on the cultural and social constituents of emotion and emotion regulation. She is currently a Senior Editor for Psychological Science.

"I am pleased to recommend this book. Its editors are very distinguished in the field of emotion research, and they have chosen contributors who are well known; not only that, but the big-name people - the stars - are here. Each contributor gives a succinct and up-to-date summary of their theoretical perspective, critical findings, and forward look, making the book more useful than the usual kinds of multi-authored works. If someone wanted an introduction to growing points in emotion research, they could not do better than to read this volume." - Keith Oatley, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Canada"This book provides a diverse multidisciplinary collection of thoughtful and well-written chapters by leading researchers. Perspectives covered range from lifespan to learning and from social-cultural to intervention, making this a comprehensive guide for understanding how and why emotions change. This book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the field." - Boris Egloff, University of Mainz, Germany

• Hermans, Rimé, & Mesquita Preface. Lifespan perspective: Levine, Kaplan & Davis, How kids keep their cool: Young children’s use of cognitive strategies to regulate emotion. Fivush, Defining and regulating the self through emotion narratives. Eisenberg, Spinrad & Betkowski, Age-related changes in empathy-related responding. Camras & Shuster, Children’s expressive behavior in different cultural contexts. English & Carstensen, Age differences in emotional experience and regulation. Marc & Woltering, Changing the neural mechanism in of emotion regulation in children with behavior problems. Learning perspective: Mineka, Individual differences in the acquisition of fears. Craske & Vervliet, Extinction learning and its retrieval. Nelson, Mechanisms of extinction in emotional regulation. Hermans & Baeyens, Generalization as a basis for emotional change: perceptual and non-perceptual processes. de Jong, Learning mechanisms in the acquisition and maintenance of disgust. Richardson, Callaghan, & Li, Preclinical analysis of developmental transitions in the extinction of learned fear: From infancy through adolescence to adulthood. Social-cultural perspective: Rimé, Can socially sharing emotions change emotions? Yzerbyt & Kuppens, Group-based appraisals to group-based emotions: The key role of social interactions. Levenson & McCarter, Couples emotion and emotion regulation. Paez, Espinosa & Bobowik, Emotional climate. Tsai, Dynamics of ideal affect. Deleersnyder & Mesquita, Emotional acculturation. Emotional dynamics perspective: Frijda , Emotion regulation: two souls in one breast. Moors, Understanding emotion change requires understanding emotion causation. Fredrickson, Learning to self-generate positive emotions. Ochsner, The role of control in emotion, emotion regulation and empathy. Thiruchselvam & Gross, What time can tell us: the temporal dynamics of emotion regulation. Van Mechelen, Verduyn, & Brans, The duration of emotional episodes. Intervention perspective: Pennebaker, Can expressive writing change emotions? An oblique answer to a misguided question. Holmes & Pictet, The powerful impact of mental imagery in changing emotions. Watkins, Cognitive mechanisms involved in therapeutic change for depression: reducing abstraction and increasing specificity. Barnes-Holmes & Hughes, A functional approach to the study of human emotion: the centrality of relational/propositional processes. Strauman, Klenk, & Eddington, Self-regulation as a mediator of change in psychotherapy. Philippot & Heeren, Mindfulness-based interventions: The dialectic of changing emotion by accepting them. Les Greenberg, Postscript.