Research
I am endlessly fascinated by how people construct their internal experience of self, and how they use that self to build and manage their views of the world around them, their emotions, and their behavior toward thriving.
In my research, I work to understand how individuals' experiences of the internal self, particularly their perspective and emotions, 1) are constituted in everyday life; 2) vary across contexts; and 3) promote thriving and achievement.
Everyday, lived experience
Key to understanding how these phenomena work is understanding how people experience them in their lives, from day-to-day, in their own context. Yet, capturing how individuals’ internal perspective and emotion are experienced in everyday life has been limited by methods until recently. Using new developments in intensive longitudinal research design and statistical methods, we can start to build a clearer picture of individuals' moment-to-moment and contextual experience. I use two approaches to this end. First, I use daily, repeated sampling methods, like experience sampling, to capture organic, moment-to-moment shifts in how individuals think, feel, and behave. Second, I use natural language methods to distill the rich, ecological experience of individuals from their language use.
Culture and contextual variation
Additionally, little is known about how these sorts of experiences may differ across contexts, but what is clear is that getting a full understanding of these phenomena requires understanding the variation in experiencing them. Thus, I seek to study individuals' experience of their internal self, perspectives, and emotions across large structural contexts such as national culture, languages, and religion.
Implications for thriving and achievement
Lastly, at the end of the day, why do these internal processes matter? Research has shown time and time again: they can have a profound impact on how successfully we achieve well-being and our meaningful, valued goals. Thus, in addition to understanding how shifts in perspective and emotion are experienced in day-to-day life and across contexts, I explore how individuals can regulates these processes for thriving and achievement.