Dedications

Many years ago when I first started graduate school in psychology I was interested in two things. I was
interested in close relationships, like friendships and romantic relationships and even parent-child
dyads. I was also interested in emotion regulation, in terms of how people respond emotionally to
everyday events. When I was in graduate school, those were the two things that I really wanted to look
at, and as I started to get involved in the literature and to understand the literature, I realized that in
the case of close relationships, almost the entire emphasis in the field was on topics like conflict
management and jealousy. There was a lot of work on rejection, or how people deal with rejection. I
thought, this didn’t fit with my understanding of why people are in relationships to begin with, and
what their experience is when they’re in those relationships, whether they are friendships or romantic
relationships. Many parent-child relationships aren’t like that either, and if you asked people why they
were in those relationships, or how to characterize those relationships, the first response wouldn’t be,
“My friend fights nicely and doesn’t reject me”. It just didn’t seem like they fit and there was so much
less research on what I thought were the everyday meat and bones of relationships, things like
companionship, or people doing fun things together, or intimacy being shared. They were out there, in
little bits and pieces, but they weren’t a big focus of the research.
So I turned to my other big topic, which was trying to understand how people respond emotionally to
everyday events. I was really interested in just day-to-day emotions, not coping with trauma or anything
along those lines, but just day-to-day emotions. Again I found that it was coping with stressors that was
a big topic. Emotion regulation of negative emotion, so how people manage stress, anxiety, anger, those
types of emotions were really big. But there was nothing on what people do when good things happen.
I found this even odder because by that time I had started doing my own research. I was doing a lot of
daily experience research, which meant I was collecting data from people on a daily basis and I was
asking about all the events they were experiencing during the day – and I found that by far, there are
more neutral and positive events outnumbering negative events during the day. This suggested to me
that our emotion regulation system cannot solely be focused on managing negative emotions, as it
wouldn’t be a very functional system in that regard.
Both of those topics, unfortunately, didn’t have a whole lot of places for me to get a foothold in the
field in terms of the topics I wanted to research. Around that time, positive psychology became a
“thing,” and so that was kind of an automatic fit that drew me into the field because that’s what I was
interested in and now it had a name.
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