In the IDEA Lab, we study people’s emotional lives. A unique focus of the lab is our research on positive affect regulation and how people think about and seek out happiness. We also try to better understand how and why people develop the emotion beliefs or regulatory strategies that they do by studying factors like attachment, familial socialization, and history of depression. For the last ~15 years, we have examined social media use to investigate how different platforms meet people’s social or emotional needs and how they may contribute to increased risk for mental health problems.

Areas of Research

• Social Media Use in Teens, College Students, and Families – Like with other topics, we often take an individual differences approach to determine why people choose to use different platforms/modes of communication or why they react differently to the same platforms.
  • In May 2025, graduate student Kimia Izadinia presented at SRCD about risk and protective factors associated with high school teens’ social media use.
  • In an earlier article, we found that extraversion is a protective factor in that extraverted teens do not report elevated depressive symptoms when often using Instagram, whereas teens low or average on extraversion do report higher levels of depressive symptoms when using Instagram frequently. We also found that teens who tend to feel badly when using social media report higher depressive symptoms when frequently on TikTok but not with other types of social media (Gentzler et al, 2023).

• In Febuary 2025, undergraduate Imalay Ruiz presented at the WV Capitol about how teens’ rates of social media addiction was related to their attachment to their parents. Specifically, boys who reported more anxious attachment to their fathers reported more problematic social media use.
• In prior work, we found that more anxiously attached college students reported more higher quality romantic relationships when they communicated with partners more often on social media. However, for more avoidantly attached college students, texting with their partner was related to higher quality relationships (Morey et al., 2013). More avoidantly attached people may prefer texting because they can better control the frequency and emotional intimacy compared to in-person communication. 

• Positive Emotion Regulation – What do people do (after good things happen or how do they seek happiness) and what are ramifications of these behaviors?
  • The pursuit of happiness and well-being. Happiness is often considered one of the most important aspects of life (as well as parents’ # 1 wish for their children), yet we do not know a lot about the pursuit of it. There are many benefits to feeling positive affect and happiness (Fredrickson, 1998; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005; Ramsey & Gentzler, 2015), but if people prioritize their own happiness too much, it can be problematic (Mauss et al., 2011). We published findings from 3 studies indicating that youth who excessively value their happiness report higher levels of depressive symptoms (Gentzler, Palmer, Ford, Moran, & Mauss, 2019). We also are investigating youth’s pursuit of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing. In an NIH-funded project, we are studying these processes longitudinally in a sample of 9th graders, with collaborators: Amy Root, Christa Lilly, Iris Mauss, Alfgeir Kristjansson, Maria Kovacs, and Veronika Huta.

• • Measurement work. We developed measures to assess how people respond to positive events. The initial survey (the PEARS/Positive Events And Responses Survey; Gentzler, Palmer, & Ramsey, 2016) includes vignettes and assesses participants’ likelihood of responding in various ways. There are versions for adults (PEARS-A; Ramsey & Gentzler, 2014) and youth (PEARS-Y). Researchers can analyze broader scales – either savoring and dampening (Ramsey & Gentzler, 2014) or natural savoring, intentional savoring, and dampening (Gentzler et al., 2016; Palmer & Gentzler, 2019). Subscales can also be analyzed on their own, such as just examining bragging (Palmer, Ramsey, Morey, & Gentzler, 2016), reflection, gratitude, etc. We also created a version (PAARS) without vignettes that asks about participants’ responses to positive affect rather than specific positive events.

• • Implications of ER strategies. We often investigate correlates or outcomes of particular emotion regulation strategies. For instance, children’s level of rumination affected their cognitive and emotional reactions after failure, which has implications for school performance (Gentzler, Wheat, Palmer, & Burwell, 2013). With positive affect regulation, young teens who savored a positive life event had higher levels of sustained positive affect about the event, even when controlling for initial positive reactions, and teens who dampened more had more internalizing and externalizing problems (Gentzler, Morey, Palmer, & Yi, 2012).

• Development of Emotion Regulation – What factors might contribute to individual or group differences in ER?
  • Beliefs about emotions. We have been studying how people think about emotions as a potentially important predictor of emotion socialization, emotion regulation, and adjustment.
  • Jeanie Pool presented her Masters thesis at SRCD in May that tested if teens’ beliefs about emotions served as a mediator between their attachment to their parents/caregivers and emotion regulation. At SRA in 2024, Jeanie presented how ER explained links between emotion beliefs and anxiety.
  • We also applied Tsai’s concept of ideal affect and affect valuation theory (Tsai, 2007) to mothers’ emotion socialization of children’s positive affect. We found that mothers who want their child to feel more high-arousal positive emotions (excitement, etc.) are more likely to encourage behaviors (celebrating) likely to elicit those emotions, whereas mothers who want their child to feel low-arousal positive emotions encourage different responses (e.g., being affectionate; Gentzler, Palmer, Yi, Root, & Moran, 2018).
  • In Jennifer Morey’s dissertation, she found that parents who have more positive beliefs about emotions (meta-emotion philosophy) are more accurate in reading children’s emotions expressions and have more desire to interact with children (Morey & Gentzler, 2017).
  • Attachment style. Children’s early relationship with their parents/caregivers teaches them if they can rely on others for support and intimacy, and how to regulate attachment needs and emotions accordingly. We found that children who are more securely attached to their fathers report more savoring of positive life events (Gentzler, Ramsey, Yi, & Palmer, 2014). Mothers who report more avoidant attachment report feeling less positively and encouraging less savoring when their children experience positive events (Gentzler, Ramsey, & Black, 2015). In older adults, Palmer and Gentzler (2018) found that more insecurely attached adults (more avoidant or more anxious) did not benefit from savoring interpersonal positive events like other adults who are more secure.
  • Parental socialization. Parents/caregivers are thought to have a major influence on children’s developing emotion regulation. We developed a measure, Parents’ Reactions to Children’s Positive Events (PRCPE; Gentzler, Ramsey, & Black, 2015), to capture how parents may encourage or coach their child to savor or dampen positive affect. We edited a quartet of papers for Social Development on parental socialization of children’s positive affect regulation and published an integrative paper discussing next steps for this research (Gentzler & Root, 2019).
• Emotion Regulation in Particular Populations
  • Emotion regulation and related attitudes and abilities in actors. As part of a collaborative project with Roger Smart, we investigated actors’ emotion beliefs and abilities. Given how integral emotions are to acting, we expected that theatre majors may have a greater emotion understanding and more skills (emotion perception, awareness, regulation, etc.) compared to college students with no acting background. We found some support for our hypotheses (Gentzler, DeLong, & Smart, 2019).
  • Emotion regulation in parents. Given that parenting can be challenging and full of emotionally-evocative situations, parents’ regulation is critically important. For example, Tyia Wilson investigated how parents and adolescents’ emotion regulation predicts parents’ happiness. Former undergraduate Kaley Morrow found mothers with elevated depressive symptoms are more likely to dampen their own positive emotions, and are less likely to savor their own or their child’s positive emotions or events.
  • Emotions in older adults. Former students, Cara Palmer and Megan Ramsey, completed studies on how people’s positive emotion regulation varies with age. Ramsey and Gentzler (2014) found that, contrary to expectations, older adults did not report more savoring than middle-aged and younger adults and savoring did not account for older adults’ higher levels of well-being. Palmer and Gentzler (2019) further advanced this research using an experiment to show that older adults savor less than middle-aged and young adults, and that older adults’ emotional goals (desiring less high-arousal positive affect and lower motivation to pursue hedonia) can explain their lower tendency to savor or to benefit from savoring.