Thank you for visiting my website! I’m Olivia, a PhD candidate at UC San Diego, Rady School of Management.

I study how individuals regulate their own and others' emotions in the workplace. These skills are essential for effective leadership, resolving conflict, and building high-quality connections in organizations. I use a multi-method approach including interventions, physiological measures, repeated-measure field studies, behavioral coding, and real-time continuous assessment during conversations.

Reappraisal Interventions Improve Creativity by 16%. I found that a reappraisal intervention, which reframes stress as beneficial, improves creative performance by 16%, whereas other regulation strategies were less effective because they reduced both helpful and harmful stress.

Strategies to Effectively Change Others’ Emotions. Effectively regulating others' emotions is a core skill at work. Yet, research on this is surprisingly limited. My work in Affective Science found that reappraising a conversation partner’s situation—rather than simply listening—effectively improves their emotions and is perceived as compassionate. This work challenges conventional wisdom on how we should respond to others’ emotions.

Helping You Helps Me. People encounter others’ negative emotions at work often. How can they help others while protecting their own well-being? My publication in Emotion shows that using interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies (e.g., reappraisal, sense-giving) reduces the one’s own physiological stress. And, over time, using more IER improves well-being.