Pierre Philippot

 

Pierre Philippot Full Professor Unit of Clinical Psychology: Emotion, Cognition, Health  Address:  Department of Psychology  Catholic University of Louvain  Place du Cardinal Mercier 10  1348 Louvain-la-Neuve  Belgium  Phone:  +32-10-47 43 78  Fax.:  +32-10-47 37 74  E-Mail:    URL:  Personal Webpage    Research domains    Representative publications

 

 

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Research domains

Cognitive regulation of emotion and autobiographical memory

• Nonverbal behavior in clinical populations
• Bodily feedback and bodily sensations in emotion
• Emotion induction

My research is mainly focused on emotion, with emphases on its regulation, its nonverbal expression, and its representation, both in normal and clinical populations.

Most of this work is articulated around a theoretical framework synthesizing multi-levels theories of emotion (the dual memory model, Philippot, Baeyens, Douilliez, Francart, 2005).

 

One line of research has focused on how different modes of activation and elaboration of emotion representations (be it, from past, present or future personal experience) impact on the intensity of emotion.

• More precisely, we have demonstrated that specifying such representations, especially in terms of their contextual features, has an inhibitory action on emotional arousal. In contrast, activating these representations at a general level favours emotional arousal.
• For an illustration of this work, see Philippot, Baeyens and Douilliez, 2006.

Such findings have important implications for our understanding of decision making: Indeed, our ability to represent and experience our potential emotional state following different outcomes of a given decision is a key determinant of that decision.

 

Another line of research has studied the relationships between the perception and decoding of emotional facial expressions and self-regulation.

• We have demonstrated several attentional or evaluative biases in different clinical populations (e.g. social phobics, alcoholics).
• For an illustration of this work, see Philippot, Douilliez, Pham, Foisy and Kornreich, 2006.

These findings have also implications for decision making in social contexts, as in such situations, decision is partly determined by social partners attitude, which in turn is decoded through their nonverbal behavior.

 

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Representative publications

Philippot, P., Chapelle, C. & Blairy, S. (2002). Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 16, 605-627.

Philippot, P., Schaefer, A., & Herbette, G. (2003). Consequences of specific processing of emotional information: Impact of general versus specific autobiographical memory priming on emotion elicitation. Emotion, 3, 270-283.

Mogg. K., Philippot, P., & Bradley, B. (2004). Selective attention to angry faces in a clinical sample with social phobia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 113, 160-165.

Philippot, P. & Douilliez, C. (2005). Social phobics do not misinterpret facial expression of emotion. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 639-352.

Philippot, P. & Feldman, R.S. (2004) (Eds.). The regulation of emotion. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.