Emotions, expectations and behaviour

Podcast 1 - Emotions, expectations and behaviour  Research Interview with Maya Tamir - Hebrew University With David Wilkinson - Editor of The Oxford Review Research Briefing available here:  Interview: March 2018   Transcript   David Wilkinson:          So, welcome to The Oxford Review video podcast. Today, I'd like to welcome Maya Tamir. She's in Israel, and she's done a very interesting paper, you've got the briefing about it: How expectations influence how emotions shape behavior. David Wilkinson:          Can you just take a couple of minutes to introduce yourself, kind of give the listeners a bit of a background to your personal journey sofar, and something about your academic history, and how you got to here in terms of your research interests. Maya Tamir:                 Sure. I did my undergraduate degree in psychology and management in Tel Aviv University, a long time ago. And then I did my PhD at the University of Illinois, in the U.S. After that, I did a postdoc with James Gross at the University of Stanford. David Wilkinson:          Ah, [crosstalk 00:01:19]. Maya Tamir:                 Focusing specifically on emotion regulation. I then got a job at Boston College, where I was faculty member for four years. And then I moved back to Israel and joined the Hebrew University here. David Wilkinson:          Okay. Fantastic. Maya Tamir:                 In terms of how I got to studying emotions. I mean for me, emotions has always been the most interesting thing, not just as a psychologist, but just as a person living in the world. David Wilkinson:          Yes. Maya Tamir:                 I was always amazed by how, I guess, how much of what's meaningful in the world somehow is connected to emotions and I wondered how this incredibly powerful thing influences us, what it does, how it does it? I've always felt, before I actually started studying emotions, that these things are ... you know that they guide and drive us more than we sometimes want them to. David Wilkinson:          Yes. Maya Tamir:                 And so I wanted to understand the mechanisms. And, of course, now I think about emotions in a very different way, but that's how I got to studying emotions. David Wilkinson:          Yes, interesting. Maya Tamir:                 Most of my research actually deals with emotion regulation, but I've always been incredibly curious about emotions. The very, very key question of how it works, which brings us here. David Wilkinson:          Yes, brilliant. Yeah, I hadn't realized that you actually worked with James Gross. He's a big hero of mine, and he's very prolific in the area- Maya Tamir:                 And rightly so. David Wilkinson:          ... of emotion regulation. I wish I had a citation record like his. So- Maya Tamir:                 He's one-of-a-kind. He's a wonderful person. David Wilkinson:          ... Yes. Yes. I've met him once, and he's very generous with his time and his knowledge. Okay, brilliant. Can you just give us a quick overview as to how you ended up doing this particular, because this paper's actually three studies. Maya Tamir:                 Mm-hmm (affirmative). David Wilkinson:          How you ended up doing this series of studies, and what led to that? Maya Tamir:                 Yeah. So, I'm particularly interested, as I mentioned before, in emotion regulation. I've always been curious about how people ... why do people want to feel certain emotions and not others. A lot of the work that I do, focuses on the idea that people may be motivated to regulate their emotions in different ways. Maya Tamir:                 Sometimes, we wanna feel good. Sometimes we don't wanna feel good. And so, I've been curious ... I wanted to understand why that is? And so, I, like I think many emotion researchers and most people, lay people who don't study emotion, always assume that emotions do certain things. Maya Tamir:                 That certain emotions do certain things in a fixed