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WHAT WE DO
We conceptualize “social stress” as experiences of stress rooted in real or perceived social interactions or evaluative judgments. Our research to date has included work on stereotype threat, ostracism, social evaluative threat, and discrimination. Below we describe active areas of study in the laboratory.
Stress Optimization
The dominant perspective in society is that stress is “bad for me” and has debilitating consequences for performance, wellbeing, and health. Given this cultural narrative, it is no surprise that stress regulation and wellness programs focus on avoiding stressors and reducing stress. However, stress is not inherently negative. Stressful experiences can lead to physiological and psychological thriving, and improve performance and wellbeing when stressors are perceived as growth opportunities and stress responses are appraised as functional and adaptive. Along these lines, researchers in the Social Stress Lab seek to develop regulatory tools to help people optimize their stress responses in motivated performance and skill acquisition contexts. Interventions developed in the lab, and in collaboration with other groups, invite individuals to (a) perceive stress responses as functional and adaptive, and (b) see opportunities inherent in stress. Past and on-going projects have developed and tested stress optimization approaches in myriad settings with diverse samples, including laboratory experiments with physiological measurement, field studies that incorporate daily diary methods, and double-blind classroom experiments with high school, community college, and 4-year university students.
Intervention materials used in Jamieson et al., 2012
Intervention materials used in Jamieson et al., 2016
Math Anxiety and Stress Appraisals
dataset from Jamieson et al., 2021, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Polyregulation
Emotion regulation studies constitute a core line of research in the Social Stress Lab. Traditionally, emotion regulation processes have been studied by examining single regulatory approaches in an emotional episode. However, people frequently identify, select, and implement multiple regulatory strategies in real world contexts. For instance, during a job interview one might seek to suppress signs that they are feeling nervous, but also seek to reappraise their stress responses as functional. How might those suppression and reappraisal strategies interact? To answer such questions research in the Social Stress Lab takes an emotion polyregulation approach, which refers to the concurrent or sequential use of multiple approaches to regulate emotions within a single emotion episode as polyregulation. On-going research focuses on examining how oppositional and synergistic concurrent regulation approaches impact affective responses to social evaluative stressors.
Social Identity Processes
Social identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and first-generation college status profoundly shape how individuals navigate social and academic contexts. These identities influence the ways people are perceived by others and how they perceive themselves, with important consequences for motivation, performance, and wellbeing. When identities are stigmatized or framed as a disadvantage, individuals may experience heightened stress, social rejection, and reduced belonging. At the same time, social identities can serve as powerful sources of strength, resilience, and connection when appraised as valuable resources. Researchers in the Social Stress Lab investigate how identity appraisals, meaning the extent to which one sees an identity as a demand or a resource, affect experiences in evaluative, social, and digital contexts. Ongoing projects explore the role of identity appraisals in shaping belonging, trust, and performance across diverse settings, including laboratory paradigms, social media studies, and field research with student populations. The broader goal of this work is to understand how people make meaning of their identities and how these processes shape everyday experiences.