ARLAB
Affect and Relationships Lab
Bar-Ilan University
Psychology Dept. &
Gonda Neuroscience Center
Contact Us: arlabbiu@gmail.com
Affect and psychopathology
The structure of affect
Can positive and negative moods be experienced simultaneously, in mixed states? Do they differ in their temporal patterns and in the discreteness with which they’re felt? Our mood diary studies have shown that the answer to all of these is yes. For example, we’ve found that individuals differ on a dimension we’ve called “affective synchrony”, which reflects the tendency to experience positive and negative moods in sync. Some appear to feel either positive or negative but never both, whereas others seem to feel more positive and more negative at the same times. Similarly, some experience affect in broad terms, whereas others differentiate among emotions more discretely. This project, and others like it, speak to the basic question of the structure of affect, and support the notion that any examination of mood (or core affect) must take into consideration at least two separate components of positivity and negativity, which are not always in opposition.
Affective experiences pervade in the day-to-day phenomenology of all individuals. Our lab examines such processes both in general (in typical populations) and in the context of psychopathology (specifically, personality and affective disorders).
Affective processes in psychopathology
In recent years, we have been exploring affective processes within psychopathology, and particularly within personality disorders. This work, done in collaboration with Geraldine Downey and Kathy Berenson has been supported by an Early Investigator Award from the BPD Research Foundation and by an R01 grant from NIMH. In our studies, we have explored the effects of social context on individuals with borderline or avoidant personality disorder; demonstrated that a cognitive association between rejection and rage is tied to stronger anger behaviors in reaction to real-life rejections; and shown that individuals with BPD are more de-synchronous and less differentiated in their affective experiences – and that these measures of affective structure are directly tied to more risky behavior, including non-suicidal self-injury.