Thank you for visiting my website. I’m Olivia, a PhD candidate at UC San Diego’s 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-measures field studies, behavioral coding, and real-time continuous assessment during conversations.

Published & Under Review:

Compassionate Responding. Across two studies of real workplace interactions, I show that emotion suppression is a key barrier to compassion. Suppressing negative emotions turns attention inward, reducing both actual compassion and how compassionate individuals are perceived.

Reappraisal and Creativity. I demonstrate that positive reappraisal enables creativity in both applied and lab settings. It works by preserving activation for enhanced cognitive persistence and by shifting appraisals to support flexible thinking,. Therefore, emotion regulation—not emotion alone—drives creativity.

Regulating Others’ Emotions. My research challenges conventional wisdom by finding that that reappraising others’ experiences, rather than simply listening, improves their emotions and increases perceived compassion. Across two studies published in Emotion, I also show that regulating others’ emotions reduces the regulator’s stress and boosts well-being, demonstrating collective benefits.