Research Projects in TEMPT

TEMPT is an active lab, running studies year-round, which includes grant-funded projects headed by Dr. Veilleux, collaborative lab-wide projects involving the entire lab, and individual projects headed by graduate students and honors students.  The overall lab has a very broad focus (emotion and self-regulation covers a LOT of territory!), and this broadness is intentional. We wish to honor the “messiness” of studying complex processes that intertwine and influence many disparate outcomes.  Please click here for representative publications, and click here for citations of conference presentations completed by TEMPT members.

The  lab operates from a multi-method approach. Graduate and undergraduate students are trained in multiple research methodologies, primarily ecological momentary assessment (EMA), a method where participants provide real-time data from a mobile device while they live their daily lives. We also do individual difference survey studies (including those focused on psychometric measurement development), experimental laboratory studies, online experimental studies, and qualitative or mixed-methods studies.

In the Spring of 2024, Dr. Veilleux was awarded an R15 grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) to fund a three-year project on distress intolerance that combines multi-week EMA with weekly assessment of transdiganostic symptoms of psychopathology along with a single session intervention. The goal of the three-year project is to try to intentionally improve people’s abilities to tolerate distress, by targeting the components theoretically articulated (by Dr. Veilleux in a recent theory paper) to underlie distress tolerance. This project builds on prior work funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Arkansas Biosciences Institute, and the lab is very excited about what the study will reveal!

Some of the work stemming from the lab involves large survey studies which focus on statistical modeling of relationships among variables using an individual difference approach.  In this arena, we have examined emotion, personality and self-regulation characteristics underlying a variety of clinical phenomena, including smokers, people who drink alcohol, people with eating pathology, and those with a suicide and self-injury history, as well as people struggling with symptoms of anxiety and depression. Dr. Veilleux and the TEMPTers are also interested in measure development and issues surrounding assessment of emotion and self-regulation (click here for more information on some of the measures and tasks developed in this lab). We have also been extremely active in laboratory experimental work that has received grant funding by the Arkansas Biosciences Institute and the John Templeton Foundation (via the “Philosophy and Science of Self-Control” project orchestrated by Florida State University. In these studies, we are currently mostly looking at understanding contextual factors that underlie distress intolerance.

Each graduate student is encouraged to conduct work that overlaps with but is distinct from the research spearheaded by Dr. Veilleux.  Students have examined the role of beliefs that emotions last “forever” on experiential avoidance, attentional bias in eating behavior, experimental induction of acceptance, development of a self-report measure of current emotional invalidation, a causal investigation of restrained eating as a cognitive mindset, self-talk as a predictor of self-control versus temptation behaviors, dismantling the opposite-to-emotion-action skill, and examining the emotional role of justifying giving in to temptation.  All of the research in TEMPT touches on emotion and/or self-regulation.