Broadly, two areas of research that I’m interested in are emotion regulation in adulthood and the development of personality across the lifespan. Regarding my first line of research, I examine how the ways in which we regulate our emotions in social situations affects others’ perceptions of us and ultimately our ability to form and maintain close relationships. I’m also currently examining whether improvements in self-regulation through training leads to improvements in emotion regulation, mainly in terms of the up-regulation of positive emotions. In the future I hope to examine the extent to which age is associated with better emotion regulation; that is, with increased life experience, do we gain a better awareness of which emotion regulation strategies work most efficiently in various contexts. Concerning my second line of research, I’m interested in how changes in the big five personality traits are associated with major life experiences (e.g., entering the workforce or getting married). Two specific questions are: (1) how does the quality of romantic relationships relate to personality trait change, and (2) can romantic partners detect changes in our personality and do their conceptions of how our personality changes match our own.

tackman@uoregon.edu