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 . Emotional conversations are common at work, but people often struggle to respond with compassion. Across two studies using real interpersonal interactions involving distress, I find that one major barrier is emotion suppression: when people hide their negative emotions to regulate them, their attention turns inward, reducing both their ability to respond compassionately (Study 1) and how compassionate they are perceived to be (Study 2).

Reappraisal and Creativity. My research shows that not all reappraisal strategies are equally effective at improving creativity. When individuals are encouraged to view their stress response as beneficial—as it signals that their activation is helpful—they become significantly more creative. In contrast, common reappraisals that focus on making the task seem fun or positive are less effective for creativity, because they dampen physiological activation.

Regulating 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 finds 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 encounters others’ emotions. Across two studies published in Emotion, I also find that deliberately regulating others’ emotions reduces one’s own physiological stress and improves well-being over time. This demonstrates that helping others regulate benefits everyone!