I am a postdoc at the Emotion & Motivation Lab at the University of Greifswald (Psychology). I study social emotions—shame, pride, envy, and regret—examining how they shape and are shaped by social context, and how they can be regulated to produce context-adaptive outcomes, both personally and socially.

A central question in my work is how social emotions regulate motivation, reputation, and status. In earlier work I examined shame and pride through their action tendencies: concealment in shame and exposure in pride. Behavioral experiments showed that these behaviors shift with social context and the content of the information at stake. Building on this, together with international collaborators from eight nations, I led a large-scale cross-cultural investigation showing that the shame system functions by monitoring the magnitude and visibility of events. Our two-factor model replicated across culturally diverse samples differing on key dimensions (e.g., collectivism–individualism, honor–face–dignity), supporting the view that shame is a universal system operating on an adaptive logic, rather than a primarily cultural construction or a maladaptive response, as is often argued.

In one current project I study how socioeconomic status shapes envy, focusing on what determines whether it takes a malicious or benign form. The two predict different motivations: malicious envy fuels hostility, while benign envy drives self-improvement. Across eight studies, we investigated how the interplay between a person's own SES and the SES of the envied target shapes each type. In a related project, we examine how envy—and specifically the synergy between benign and malicious mechanisms—affects status and well-being. Working from the premise that envy is an adaptation for closing status gaps, and building on our prior findings, we predict that experiencing both forms improves status equalization and well-being. In a separate envy project, we develop a novel emotion regulation framework aimed at transforming envy into its benign form.

Beyond my core work on social emotions, I also conduct basic research on emotion. In one project we utilized affective habituation to demonstrate that the IAT measures stable affective knowledge (attitudes) rather than emotional responses. In another research we examined the role of conceptual properties in emotional learning following repeated exposure, demonstrating that categorization-based abstraction shapes affective habituation, and that these effects are contingent on valence.

I am also interested in applied research aimed at advancing social justice. I recently led a review of inclusion in gaming communities, proposing a model for more equitable gaming. In another project I study the cognitive and emotional barriers to prosocial behavior, with a focus on charitable giving. In a current line of work on donation, we ask whether the fairness–help moral conflict that arises when facing multiple recipients is reduced in sequential donations. We find that offering donors a choice between recipients initially heightens moral conflict but ultimately serves as a buffer: confronting the conflict early reduces conflict and regret over time, which substantially increases the likelihood of repeated donations.