RESEARCH
Mind-Body Health, Leadership, Culture, Social Connection, & Compassion
Emma Seppälä has studied well-being, human resilience and human thriving from various angles: mind-body practices, leadership, culture, social connection and compassion. She has studied the impact of yoga-based practices on trauma and mental health, the benefit of meditation for social connection, and the impact of cultural perspectives on well-being. Below is a short summary of some of her areas of research. To see a complete list of publications, see her Google Scholar profile here.
Mind-Body Interventions for Resilience & Well-Being
Emma is passionate about helping people become psychologically resilient and stress-free. To this end, she has looked at mind-body interventions - in particular breathing and meditation - to help boost mental health and psychological well-being.
Seppala, E. M., Nitschke, J. B., Tudorascu, D. L., Hayes, A., Goldstein, M. R., Nguyen, D. T. H., Perlman, D., & Davidson, R. J. (2014)
Breathing-based meditation decreases posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in military veterans: A randomized controlled longitudinal study. Journal of Traumatic Stress.
Social Connection, Compassion & Meditation
Social connection is one of our fundamental human needs (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Social connection has been linked to psychological and physical health, recover from disease and even longevity while lack of social connection is worse for health than smoking and obesity. For more information on the health benefits of social connection, see Emma Seppälä’s psychology today post. The following papers on social connection, loving-kindness meditation and compassion were a result of research conducted by Seppälä with Cendri Hutcherson, Ph.D. and James Gross, Ph.D. as well as James R. Doty, M.D., at Stanford University.
Neff, K., Seppala, E. M.
(Ed. Brown, K. W., Leary, M. 2016)
Compassion, Well-being, and the Hypoegoic Self . Handbook of Hypo-egoic Phenomena
Zimbardo, P, Seppala, E. M., Doty, J.R. (2017)
Heroism: Socially-Engaged Compassion in Action. Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science
Culture and Emotion
Culture impacts how we feel. Emotions are experienced differently in different cultural contexts. In East Asian contexts, for example, preference is given to positive emotions that are more peaceful such as calmness whereas in American contexts, preference is given to positive emotions that are more high-intensity, such as excitement.. The following papers, the results of Emma Seppälä’s research with Dr. Jeanne Tsai at Stanford University, explain how social interactions and religion may relate to these cultural differences.
Compassion & Business
What role do of a company’s values play in the well-being of their employees? How does someone’s attitude toward their work impact their well-being levels. How important is social connection at work? The field of organization behavior and corporate well-being is relatively new yet we spend most of our time at the workplace. Recent research is showing that happier workplaces are more profitable. This line of research seeks to understand how to increase happiness at the workplace and what factors most contribute to employee well-being.
