Our lab investigates flexibility as a fundamental mechanism supporting mental health and adaptation across the lifespan. Flexibility—the ability to shift perspectives, behaviors, and emotional responses according to changing demands—is a key factor in coping with challenges and promoting resilience.

We study flexibility across diverse populations and contexts, including parent-child relationships, emotional adaptation in older adulthood, and in conditions prone to rigidity such as borderline personality disorder and recovery after brain injury. Our goal is to clarify how different components of flexibility—cognitive, affective, and psychological—interact and contribute to adaptive functioning.

We explore what enables flexibility, how it develops, and what happens when it is compromised. Through this work, we aim to identify mechanisms that underlie psychopathology and inform interventions designed to enhance resilience and emotional well-being across diverse populations.

To capture flexibility comprehensively, we combine multiple methods—validated self-report scales, EEG markers of neural dynamics, and high-frequency diary protocols that track moment-to-moment change. In addition, we have developed a novel affective task-switching paradigm, that uses emotional facial expressions to probe voluntary switching. This paradigm offers an ecologically valid, objective laboratory index of affective flexibility.