Nancy follows-up from our interview with THE GIVER author Lois Lowry. Lois talked about how, as a girl, she loved the American children’s author Lois Lenski. Nancy recognized that author and then remembered that our guest, Dr. Karen Roggenkamp from Texas A&M-Commerce had mentioned Lois Lenski, also. That was episode 84. She was our guest to discuss THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB. Karen mentioned she is starting a digital research project focusing on Lenski’s work. JUDY’S JOURNEY, during the Great Depression, and PRAIRIE GIRL set in North Dakota, really impacted Karen as a child. Our guest today is Dr. Bryan Denny. Bryan is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Rice University and Director of the Translational Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab. He received his BA in psychology in 2005 from Stanford University and his PhD in psychology in 2012 from Columbia University. and he has been at Rice since 2016. Dr. Denny has had a longstanding interest in seeking to understand the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that underlie successful and unsuccessful emotion regulation across a spectrum of healthy and clinical populations. He is interested in utilizing the results of basic investigations into these processes in order to design and examine novel interventions focused on improving real-world emotion regulation outcomes in a variety of contexts. Outside the lab and teaching, he enjoys traveling, éclairs au chocolat, sushi, playing drums, and karaoke. Bryan is really a wonderful guest to help us further delve into the research we read about in Ethan Kross’s SHIFT: MANAGING YOUR EMOTIONS SO THEY DON’T MANAGE YOU. Bryan tells us he has always been interested in the brain and how it works, but he didn’t know a person could study that in college. He took Intro to Psych 101 from Brian Knutson, an affective neuroscientist, and switched his major. From his collegiate studies through his PhD, he became really intrigued in the application of fMRIs in understanding the brains processes in emotion regulation via brain imagining studies. Bryan tells Nancy that her understanding of emotional regulation as managing your emotions is pretty good. He goes on to explain some of the techniques used to do so. He talks about situation, strategy, person contingencies and how research may help understand what strategy is helpful for who in what situation. This knowledge may help individuals, but also will help clinicians in their practice, as well. Bryan says some people have the notion that emotions are things we can turn on or off, but a lot of research is related to acceptance. Bryan’s work is currently looking at psychological distancing which may be a key component of mindfulness. A psychological distancing mindset helps individuals identify their stressors in real time to help not become swept-up in emotions. You can do this for yourself, but also for others to influence their emotional state. Bryan then tells us about the longitudinal emotion regulation research conducted by his lab, the Translational Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (T-SCAN). He is interested in long-term interventions and has recently been focusing on populations such as caregivers of persons with dementia and also of bereaved persons. Bryan trains people to think of emotion regulation tools as tools in a tool bag that can be sharpened and pulled out and applied in the appropriate situation. To know what the appropriate tool is for a situation is for a person calls for more sophisticated models about how emotion and emotion regulation work. Then, delivering through clinicians and through targeted drugs, but also through education and phone nudges and other modalities could help people cope more adaptively.