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.

Papers Published and Under Review:

Suppressing Emotions Undermines Compassion. Suppressing negative emotions undermines compassionate responding by shifting attention inward, away from the other person. Across two studies using real interpersonal interactions, we find that suppression reduces both behavioral compassion and how compassionate individuals are perceived to be.

Reappraisal and Creativity. Reappraisal interventions that frame stress as beneficial improve creativity, whereas other reappraisal strategies are less effective because they reduce physiological activation, which is associated with increase creativity.

Changing Others’ Emotions. Being able to change others’ emotions at work is a core skill, yet research on it remains surprisingly limited. My work in Affective Science shows that reappraising, rather than simply listening, improves others’ emotions and is perceived as more compassionate. This challenges conventional wisdom about what to do when one encounter others’ emotions.

Helping You Helps Me. Individuals often encountering others’ negative emotions at work. My publication in Emotion finds that using interpersonal emotion regulation (e.g., reappraisal, sense-giving) reduces one’s own physiological stress and increases well-being over time. This demonstrates that helping others manage their emotions can improve one’s own well-being.