Emotion

What happens from feeling bad to feeling better?

Most people think about intensity: that feeling better simply means that negative emotions have become less intense. My research goes beyond change in intensity of emotions to also include types of emotions.

I study how people transition between different emotions in daily life—for example, moving from anger to sadness. These transitions may systematically accompany overall changes in emotion intensity (e.g., transitions between negative emotions accompany decreases in their intensity). My research ambition is to show that to every subsiding emotion there is often another emotion arising—just as when you are reading this, your feeling of interest may be transitioning into inspiration, skeptical alertness, or something in between.

To support the above research line, I’ve become a half-baked methodologist that focuses on capturing multivariate temporal variability. Drawing inspiration from ecology, I have introduced Bray-Curtis dissimilarity, an approach that is sensitive in how multiple psychological variables (such as different emotions and regulation strategies) change in composition across time (e.g., transitioning from anger to sadness, but not just the changes in the overall intensity of negative emotions).

So far, I’ve applied this method to research in emotion and emotion regulation. Other researchers have applied it to personality and parenting.