Prior to entering the world of cognitive neuroscience, Rice University Associate Professor of Psychology Bryan Denny described himself as an “idealistic kid” who had a diverse array of interests in math, science and literature. Because of his passion for so many different subjects, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do until he entered college at Stanford University in 2001.
“I didn’t know, before I went to college, all of the ways that you could make academic inquiry into topics around psychology,” Denny added. “I didn’t know what the current debates were in psychology … and it wasn’t until that time that I really became more acquainted with what the active questions were, not just in psychology, but in lots of different fields.”
Undergraduate education, then Rice University
“One of the biggest things you can learn in college is what you don’t know.” Denny said.
Noting that one of the greatest advantages he found in college was exploring new interests and following his passions, Denny originally pursued civil engineering — specifically, he wanted to build bridges. However, during his experience working as an engineering intern, he realized civil engineering wasn’t exactly what he had imagined.
Finally, at an engineering orientation at Stanford, Denny was able to solidify his doubt of following a career in engineering. He encountered students who spent countless hours during their nights and weekends “tinkering with robots,” and he found that instead of robots, he was interested in something else entirely — emotion regulation.
“I was interested in math and science — how did that even go together with thinking about human emotion and emotion regulation?” Denny said. “And I was very interested in the brain — how could you study emotion regulation and also study the brain? In my naive understanding, I didn’t see how these things fit together, and at Stanford, my mind was completely blown.”
Denny witnessed the beginning of the first functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies involved with emotion regulation, which further developed his admiration for the field of psychology. fMRI had only been used for vision and attention since its advent in the 1990s, and at Stanford he encountered a first look into its use in emotion regulation — an experience that he also described as “mind blowing.”
During an introductory psychology class at Stanford, Denny experienced another instance that expanded his passion for psychology. He had been wandering the halls of the psychology building when he found a paper taped up on a cork board titled “Rethinking Feelings — an fMRI Study of the Cognitive Regulation of Emotion.”
“I was so completely blown away just from the title — that you could do research on that, and that the date said 2002, which was contemporaneous,” Denny added. “And the idea that you could actually do research on that was unbelievably exciting.”
He immediately downloaded the paper and was not only enlightened about the paper’s subject, but also about how he could pursue all of his interests through psychology.
“That was my inspiration,” Denny said. “It was from being extremely interested in psychology … throughout my whole life, but only in college realizing you could probe questions of psychology that were integrating psychology, math, statistics, biology, philosophy, neuroscience.”
Following his graduation from Stanford, Denny completed his Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University, and then completed his postdoctoral education at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Finally, Denny accepted a position at Rice University. Having grown up in San Antonio, Texas, he had previously applied there for his undergraduate education and knew of its reputation as a research-focused institution. The university also provided an excellent opportunity for him to be close to his family.
“It was an opportunity to be at a terrific, well-resourced R1 University with a terrific bioscience research collaborative, which I’m part of now, which is state of the art,” Denny added.
COVID-19 Research
“When COVID happened, it was such a terrible thing for everyone,” Denny said. “But amidst all the challenges of COVID, we thought at least hopefully we might be able to do some useful research during this time.”
Along with his former graduate student Eva Dicker and former research assistant Jenna Jones, Denny began investigating how people regulated their emotions during the pandemic.
Making use of the theoretical emotion regulation model created by James Gross, a leading researcher in emotion regulation studies, Denny and the other researchers conducted a survey with a sample size of almost 300 individuals. They utilized the model to delineate different classes of COVID emotion regulation strategies, including two types of reappraisal methods: reinterpretation and psychological distancing.
According to Denny, reappraisal is a form of cognitive shift characterized by reframing or reinterpreting the meaning of a stimulus .
“So you’re not changing the situation itself, and you’re not distracting yourself to focus on other details or aspects of the situation,” Denny added. “But rather, you’re re-representing cognitively what those details or aspects of the situation mean to you.”
Reinterpretation, according to Denny, is a process where negative emotions are downregulated by “looking on the bright side,” or thinking about how something is not as bad as it is perceived and that it could get better with time. Psychological distancing, on the other hand, is when a situation is seen from a cooler, impartial and more objective perspective.
Denny and his team hypothesized that psychological distancing, rather than reinterpretation, was more helpful for emotion regulation during the pandemic. In the midst of 2020, there was no sign that indicated the situation was going to improve, and with psychological distancing, facing the situation in an impartial and objective way was more effective.
“We asked in these different ways, what emotional regulation strategies people were using … did you alter your situation to become less stressful or more normal, for example, by engaging in virtual social interaction with friends and family via zoom, FaceTime, etc., to try to make things feel more normal?” Denny said. “So how much did you do that? Alternatively, how much did you distract yourself from crisis related events and information and focus your attention elsewhere?”
After asking a multitude of questions to their study participants that attempted to form an understanding around the use of reappraisal strategies during COVID, the research team validated their hypothesis that psychological distancing uniquely predicts reduced stress levels during the pandemic.
“Our interpretation of [psychological distancing] is that it was a pretty broad based effect,” Denny said. “Distancing was shown to be helpful in the context of the COVID pandemic in a fairly broad and generalized way across people with different baseline emotion dysregulation, people of different age, people of different gender, people of differing socio-economic status, and people of different race and ethnicity.”
Furthermore, regarding the pandemic’s everlasting effects on human psychology, Denny mentioned that the upsurge of online shopping and food delivery systems during the pandemic, which are still continuously being used, will likely continue to increase. He hypothesized that these behavioral changes caused as a result of social distancing have stuck around even after the pandemic ended.
“I know that people were very stressed during the pandemic, but people are also remarkably psychologically resilient as well,” Denny added. “So it’s a very good scientific question to see if there are enduring changes. I think that there are some clear behavioral changes that are going to stick around, but I’m less certain about the cognitive changes, although I think that that’s a really good question for future research.”
Impact
Looking towards the future, Denny noted that he hopes to contribute work to understanding the mechanisms of the brain in emotion regulation. He wants to learn how to optimize current emotion regulation strategies that encompass the diversity of differences among individuals, noting that certain strategies fit for one group of people may not help for another.
“Because even if a given strategy is helpful for you, even with all of the individual differences that make up you as a person, it really depends also, very much so on the situation, to determine what strategy is the best fit,” Denny said.
Denny further emphasized the importance of acknowledging that the strategies a person uses to regulate their emotions is dependent on a multitude of factors, including situation, and that “one size does not fit all.”
He also hopes to create a difference in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, making a contribution to research behind training people using individual strategies that can help them in their unique circumstances.
“To just make any sort of contribution to that kind of intellectual enterprise, both at a basic science level of understanding, neuro-scientifically, how we regulate emotion with our brains, on the basic research side,” Denny said. “And then on the translational research side, thinking about how we can apply that information to the design of optimized emotion regulation interventions. That’s what I’d love to hope to accomplish.”
