Social and Emotional Resources for Health (SERH)

Group Leader: Dr. Andrea B. Horn

Group Members: Zilla Huber, Ronja Schmid, Leonie Abderhalden, Beatrice Iten

Projects

CoupleSense: Health and Interpersonal Emotion Regulation

CoCoCap65plus

Co-Sense

Music-assisted Reminiscence Therapy (MRT)

Overview

Social and Emotional resources are fundamental for the experience of mental and physical health over the lifespan. Health promotion is not complete without promoting mental, emotional health and meaningful relationships. Meaningful social relationships and positive emotional resources are strong predictors of longevity and age-related quality of life.

Our expertise lies in the investigation of interpersonal regulation in relationships in different life-phases. Social regulatory processes can be more or less adaptive – social relationships have impact on our life; for better, for worse. We aim to contribute to a better understanding of processes underlying the benefits of social resources in contrast to social stress and isolation to inform innovative measures aiming at fostering social resources and thus health and wellbeing.

The main research expertise of this group lies in the interplay between intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation and its associations with health embedded within a life span perspective. What role does the regulation of individuals’ own emotions play when it comes to benefiting from the resources social relations can provide? Is fostering individual emotional resources through self-administered interventions like expressive writing associated with processes leading to better relationship quality? What processes underlie interpersonal emotion regulation that fosters wellbeing and what situational resources are needed?  

Embedded in an affective and relational science perspective as well as applied perspectives in health and clinical psychology, this research group’s methodological core competence is dyadic ambulatory assessment, which enables an investigation of the variables of interest in everyday life and over time. In addition to subjective experiences, objective data is collected via sensing, e.g. how much time partners spend together in daily life and language use in real-life conversations.

Applied Research and Innovation Potential

SERH conducts multi-method research on social and emotional processes and their association with health across the lifespan. We also investigate interventions fostering social and emotional resources in daily life (see the CoCoCap65plus project) and what situational factors on daily life provide a good context for beneficial social processes in young and old couples.

Data Access and Exchange

SERH relies on real life behavioral and experiential longitudinal data streams of individuals and dyads. By collecting such data, we contribute to the HLC's data source, which can then be used to feedback and launch new developments.