Berge Osnes

Keywords: 

• Emotion regulation difficulties
• Alexithymia
• Psychological treatment

Research interests:

• Etiology of emotion regulation difficulties
• Role of alexithymia in psychopathology and treatment
• Psychotherapy research

Emotion regulation difficulties are common for individuals that have experienced aversive life events and invalidation, and for some individuals with cognitive difficulties such as attention difficulties and/or autism traits. In my research an important instrument for studying emotion regulation difficulties, has been heart rate variability (HRV) in combination with clinical measures, experimental measures, and self-report measures. HRV is considered an index of the nervous system’s ability to flexibly adapt to changing environmental demands and is considered a biological index of emotion regulation. In my research, HRV is also applied to investigate functional aspects of phenomena related to emotion regulation difficulties, such as alexithymia, emotional bias, internalizing difficulties and emotion regulation strategies, both in psychopathological and healthy samples.  In relation to psychotherapeutic interventions for emotion regulation difficulties, my research interest is particularly in non-suicidal self-harm (NSSH), and its relation to attention disorders and difficulties with pragmatic language.

One transdiagnostic factor that predicts both severity of psychopathology and prognosis is alexithymia, which refers to a difficulty in verbalizing, experiencing, and differentiating emotions. An important aspect of my current and future research is developing tools to identify and study this phenomenon experimentally. It is of great importance to study both the differential manifestation of alexithymia, and to study its prevalence in psychiatric populations. Furthermore, I am interested in therapeutic interventions that targets and alleviates these difficulties because of its prognostic importance. This interest has a broad scope, ranging from interventions to increase emotion regulation skills for children in a school setting, to investigation of treatment effect of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.