Title: Beliefs About Emotions: Investigating the Relationship with Emotion Regulation and Emotional Disorders, as well as the Underlying Neural Mechanisms (2025–2027)

Funding Source: The project is supported by a Young Research Teams Grant from the Romanian Ministry of Education and the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding in Romania (MEN-UEFISCDI). Grant number: PN-IV-P2-2.1-TE-2023-1395.

Host Institution: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, through the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy / International Institute for the Advanced Study of Psychotherapy and Applied Mental Health.

Project Duration: August 2025 – July 2027

Principal Investigator: Assistant Professor Răzvan Predatu

Project Summary:
This project investigates beliefs about emotions as a key dimension of emotion regulation, with significant implications for emotional functioning and emotional disorders. While research has increasingly recognized the role of maladaptive beliefs about emotions in psychopathology, the construct remains insufficiently explored, especially regarding its measurement, network-level associations, and biological underpinnings.

The project is organized into three main studies:

1. Development and validation of a novel self-report measure – the Rational and Irrational Beliefs About Emotions Scale (RI-BAES) – specifically designed to assess both adaptive and maladaptive beliefs about emotions in clinical and non-clinical populations.
2. Network analysis of beliefs about emotions, emotion regulation strategies, and symptoms of emotional disorders (anxiety and depression), with the goal of identifying which beliefs are most central in driving dysfunctional regulation and psychopathology.
3. Examination of physiological and neural mechanisms underlying beliefs about emotions, using psychophysiological methods (electrodermal activity, ECG, respiration) and functional MRI (fMRI), marking the first study to assess how these beliefs are instantiated at the brain level.

Through this multi-method approach, the project provides a more comprehensive understanding of how beliefs about emotions contribute to emotional functioning and disorders. By bridging subjective, behavioral, physiological, and neural levels of analysis, the findings will advance theoretical models of emotion regulation and inform clinical interventions aimed at targeting dysfunctional beliefs about emotions in individuals struggling with anxiety and depression.