Hello! We are the Emotional Lives Lab. We study emotion and emotion regulation in daily life.
Lab News
March 2026
Exciting update: Our former undergrad RA Jocelyn Aragon is starting graduate school at Cal State LA for a Master of Science in Counseling: Option in School-Based Family Counseling! Congratulations, Jocelyn!
Come see Dr. Springstein, Macey, Bella, Lexi, and Thinh at SAS!
February 2026
We have exciting news: Thinh Nguyen received a Travel Mini grant to attend and present a poster at the SAS conference in Pittsburgh in March and both Bella and Macey got talks accepted at the European Conference on Personality in Edinburgh this summer!
We are currently recruiting new undergraduate research assistants! Please fill out this Google Form to apply!
January 2026
We are delighted to announce that we’ve added a few undergraduate RAs to our team. Welcome Jackie Zavala and Sarai Bielmas! Please also welcome honors student Ricky Bechtel!
We have also resumed data collection for our first study. If you are a UCR student interested in participating, please click here.
December 2025
We are excited to announce that Macey, Bella, Lexi, and Thinh’s abstract submissions to the annual Society for Affective Science (SAS) conference were all accepted! We are very excited to go to Pittsburgh, PA this March.
November 2025
We are currently looking to add a few undergraduate research assistants to our team. Please fill out this Google Form to apply!
October 2025
We just launched our first study! Please click here if you are interested in participating.
September 2025
We are very excited to welcome our new lab manager Lexi Suarez to the Emotional Lives Lab!
We are also very excited to officially welcome Isabella (Bella) Avalos and Macey Grisso as graduate students in the lab!
August 2025
Macey just had her first first-authored paper titled “Generalizing across people or capturing unique personal experiences? Nomothetic to idiographic ways of assessing self-reported emotions in daily life” co-authored with Dr. Springstein accepted at Translational Issues in Psychological Science. A huge accomplishment before starting graduate school next month – Congratulations Macey!!
Yesenia Contreras-Urrutia gave a wonderful talk at the MSRIP symposium! Congrats, Yesi!
Yesenia Contreras-Urrutia will be giving a talk entitled “Using Experience Sampling Methods to Examine the Effects of Environmental Stimuli on Daily Mood” for her Mentoring Summer Research Internship for Graduating Seniors (MSRIP) project! The MSRIP symposium will be held on August 15th.
June 2025
Dr. Springstein and Macey had a wonderful time presenting their work at the Association for Research on Personality Conference!
The Emotional Lives Lab will be presenting at the Association for Research on Personality conference at the end of this month! Macey is excited to give her very first talk at one of the preconferences!
Thank you to our wonderful lab for an amazing first year! We had a bittersweet end of quarter celebration where we said goodbye to three graduating seniors.
Our team is growing! We hope to recruit a new lab manager to start in September. Please visit this job advertisement for more details on what a successful applicant looks like and to fill out an application.
May 2025
We are so excited that Yesenia Contreras-Urrutia was accepted into the Mentoring Summer Research Internship for Graduating Seniors (MSRIP) program! She will be working on a research project on environmental influences on emotions with Dr. Springstein.
We’re thrilled to share that we have two PhD students joining the Emotional Lives Lab this Fall! We can’t wait to welcome Isabella Avalos to UCR, and we’re so excited that Macey Grisso will be staying with us in this new role. We will also be hiring a new lab manager to join our growing team—stay tuned for the ad!
March 2025
Dr. Springstein and Macey had a wonderful time presenting their work at the Society for Affective Science Conference!
Dr. Springstein and Macey will present their research at the Society for Affective Science conference in Portland from March 20 – March 22.
February 2025
Dr. Springstein will give a talk entitled “Emotions as Self-Regulatory Systems? Integrating Emotion Regulation Goals” at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference in Denver, Colorado. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Emorie Beck & PhD candidate Rohit Batra from the University of California, Davis. The symposium entitled “A Dynamic and Multifaceted Perspective on Well (and Ill)-being in Daily Life” will be held on February 22nd at 9:30 AM in Bluebird 2E.
January 2025
Dr. Springstein will be talking about her research at an upcoming event on campus for the Aging and your Brain: Advancing Aging Research at UC Riverside Symposium. The symposium is open to the public and will be held at CHASS Interdisciplinary South, 1113 on Friday, January 31st from 1PM to 3PM. Hope to see you there!
Dr. Springstein is celebrating a publication in the Psychological Sciences section of The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, titled “How often and why do people manage their emotions in older adulthood?”
Macey has had her first co-authored paper, titled “Intersection of Biases: In-Group Positivity for Racially Diverse Ambiguous Facial Expressions” accepted for publication in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. This work was conducted by Dr. Jordan Pierce at the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, where Macey previously worked.
We are so excited that Dr. Springstein was awarded a SoCal OASIS Grant for her proposal “Healthy emotional aging for minority older adults in Riverside County” in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Wu’s lab. We can’t wait to get this research started!
Dr. Springstein and Macey received notices that their submissions for the Society for Affective Science conference were accepted. They will present the lab’s research in Portland at the end of March!
8 new undergraduate research assistants have joined the lab. Welcome to the lab we are so excited to start working with you!
October 2024
We have launched our undergraduate research application and will be looking to recruit several motivated research assistants for the Winter quarter! You can fill out an application for the lab here.
September 2024
Macey Grisso just joined as our new lab manager and first lab member. Welcome, Macey!