I am an assistant professor at Harvard Business School (NOM) and a psychologist by training. My research focuses on the role of emotions in social interactions and their behavioral outcomes, particularly in the context of social and political issues. To examine questions in this domain, I employ a multi-method approach that integrates behavioral experiments, analysis of data from digital media, and computational modeling.
I received my PhD from Stanford University under the supervision of James Gross. Before that, I worked as a journalist and a writer. In 2016, my first novel ‘A City Forsaken’ (עיר הנידחת) was published in Israel (Keter Publishing House).
These are the questions I think about:
What are the processes that make groups emotional? One of the most basic insights in social sciences is that a group of people is more emotional than an array of separate individuals. But what exactly leads groups to increased emotionality? My research attempts to map the way emotional interactions contribute to increased group emotionality and how these increased emotions influence group processes such as polarization, collective action and conflicts.
How can emotions be regulated? In many situations in life, experiencing or expressing certain emotions may not be helpful for us to achieve our goals or the goals of our group. In these cases, we often try to regulate our emotions or those of people around us. My research asks the question of what strategies are most useful for emotion regulation? And how is emotion regulation impacted by social and group processes?
How does technology impact the way we express and experience emotions? In the digital age, we are constantly exposed to more emotions by more people than ever. Technology not only amplifies psychological processes, but also provides us with an opportunity to examine psychological processes, both at the individual and macro level, on a large scale.
Loneliness: how does lack of meaningful social interactions influence us? One of the biggest problems in the modern era is loneliness. In my work I try to understand the factors that are likely to contribute to loneliness and whether these can be addressed. My research focuses on social tendencies and behaviors that are associated with loneliness, and ways in which these tendencies can be mitigated.
twitter | email: agoldenberg/at/hbs.edu
