LABORATORY
Research goals.
Will working with your emotions in a more psychologically healthy way lead to better physical health? Can it reduce–and perhaps eliminate–your chronic pain?
Is it healthy for people to experience and express their emotions, especially those that are related to stressful experiences and conflicts? Or does doing so just make things worse?
Will working with your emotions in a more psychologically healthy way lead to better physical health? Can it reduce–and perhaps eliminate–your chronic pain?
Is it healthy for people to experience and express their emotions, especially those that are related to stressful experiences and conflicts? Or does doing so just make things worse?
Our lab tries to answer these and related questions. Our primary focus is the interface of stress, emotional processes, and physical health. In particular, we develop and test the health benefits of various ways to experience and express avoided emotions, including writing or talking about stressful personal experiences (“emotional disclosure”), intensive emotion-focused interviews, and various individual and group therapies. We often test these approaches on patients who have chronic pain and other disorders that are “medically unexplained,” such as fibromyalgia, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, low back pain, and chronic pelvic pain. We also compare these approaches to standards in the field, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy or relaxation training.
An additional focus of our research is to determine for whom different types of interventions are best suited. Thus, we study individual differences in personality and situational variables as predictors of the success of our therapies.
Our laboratory is headed by Mark A. Lumley, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Psychology and a member of the APA-accredited Clinical Psychology Program at Wayne State University.
Location
5057 Woodward Avenue, Suite 7908
Detroit, Michigan 48202,
United States
Pages
