Academic and Research Communication with Prof. Maya Tamir

On July2nd, 2018, Prof. Maya Tamirfrom Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel visited the faculty of psychology of Southwest University,and made a wonderful report entitled‘Emotion Goals Shape Emotion Regulation’. All the teachers and students present enjoyed her report.

Her report is mainly about emotion regulation. When people regulate emotions, they use emotion regulation strategies to achieve emotion goals (i.e., desired emotional states). Whereas strategies receive considerable attention in the field, less attention has so far been directed to emotion goals. In her talk, she was devoted to acknowledging the importance of studying emotion goals, and understanding their unique nature. She argued that what people wanted to feel critically shaped emotion regulation. And she showed that emotion goals determine whether, when and how people regulate emotions. And also, she examined potential sources of emotion goals. She proposed that emotion goals operate within a hierarchical goal system. Throughout the talk,we knew what people wanted to feel carried important implications for key psychological outcomes, including social interactions, psychopathology, and well-being.

Maya Tamir is a full professor and the incoming Chair of the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. She completed her doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her post-doctoral training at Stanford University. She is an action editor at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and at Emotion Review, and an editor of the Cambridge Series on Emotion and Social Interaction. Her work has been published in leading psychology journals and funded by Israeli, European, and American funding agencies. Her research focuses on emotion and emotion regulation, offering an instrumental approach to emotion regulation