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Health psych, resilience & positive adaptation and improvement in health | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Project Description Research Interests My research program focuses on the factors that promote resilience and thriving and improve health and well-being. These factors include but are not limited to emotion regulation, emotional disclosure, gratitude, hope, compassion, loving-kindness, meaning and purpose, mindfulness meditation, acceptance, posttraumatic growth, and spirituality. The kinds of interventions we are most interesting in developing and testing in our lab are those involving mindfulness meditation (e.g., Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR), Motivational Interviewing (MI), acceptance-based approaches (e.g., Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT, Dialectic Behavioral Therapy or DBT), and positive psychology interventions to identify and build personal strengths and increase well-being. We are also interested in how narratives, movies, personal stories, and the idea of a “hero’s quest” can be used to can be used to increase resilience and improve well-being. Our lab is studying how these factors, processes, and interventions may affect health and well-being in people facing a variety of stresses and challenges including traumatic and health stressors such as working as a first responder and have chronic pain, cancer, or cardiovascular disease. We are also more generally interested in how all people maintain a sense of health well-being across the lifespan despite the kinds of everyday stress and life adversity that everyone faces and experiences. Our long-term goals include (1) contributing to the development of a theoretical model of resilience and thriving and how they affect health and well-being, (2) contributing to the integration of findings from psychology with neuroscience and the broader health sciences, and (3) developing interventions that increase resilience and thriving and improve health and well-being for people facing all kinds of life stressors, challenges, and adversity. Eligibility | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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