Emotional Experience, Expression, and Regulation

Once considered irrational, emotions often exert a more profound influence on decision-making and workplace outcomes than logic or reason. Professor Brooks studies emotional experience, emotional expression, and how individuals can regulate their emotions effectively. Much of her research in this domain has focused on anxiety, one of the most pervasive emotions people experience in the workplace (and outside of work). Unlike research in clinical psychology, which has focused on treatments and medications that might help individuals with disordered or abnormal anxiety, her research focuses on the type of anxious feelings most people experience every day—the anxiety we feel before leading a meeting, giving a public speech, or completing difficult tasks. She has identified important behavioral consequences of feeling anxious: it limits our ability to take others’ perspectives, causes us to seek out and rely heavily on advice (even when the advice is obviously bad), and causes individuals to reply quickly, make steep concessions, exit prematurely, and earn less profit in negotiations.

Fortunately, anxiety can be managed. Professor Brooks has identified several novel methods for mitigating the deleterious effects of anxiety. For example, most people think they should calm down when they feel anxious. Instead, staying in a high-arousal state and reframing anxiety as excitement is much more effective for performing well on high-pressure performance tasks. Next, she finds that pre-performance rituals—once believed to be highly irrational—can actually reduce performance anxiety and improve subsequent performance. Finally, she finds that after an expression of distress (e.g., crying at work), people have tremendous control over how people perceive them. For example, saying “I’m passionate about this” rather than “I’m emotional about this” increases others’ perceptions of one’s competence and self-control. This work contributes to the emerging field of interpersonal emotion regulation—how we can exert control over others’ emotions and their perceptions of our emotions.

Professor Brooks's interest in anxiety has expanded to include other emotions as well. For example, she has used large datasets from Facebook to show that higher amounts and higher diversity of emotional expression online increase happiness and life satisfaction at both the individual and national levels. Then, by studying time capsules, she finds that there is a unique, unanticipated joy associated with rediscovering mundane details from your past. And, finally, she finds that revealing personal failures (in addition to successes) reduces malicious envy felt by observers and increases benign envy, inspiring others to work hard to achieve the same success.