Affect, ambivalence, & adjustment
Welcome to the AAA Lab!
About
Our research group focuses on social psychological research on emotions, adult functioning, and psychological well-being. Our primary area of expertise specifically involves scientific inquiry into mixed emotions – if you’ve ever found yourself feeling bittersweet, or both happy and sad, or both grateful and guilty towards someone, that’s exactly the type of emotional experience we study: ones in which people don’t just feel positive or negative, but both positive and negative. In addition, we are also invested in examining practical questions concerning the factors that enable (or hinder) individuals from living healthy, fulfilling, and functional lives.
Our work in these areas has been published in various peer-reviewed academic journals, including Personality and Social Psychology Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Health Psychology, Emotion, Cognition and Emotion, and Journal of Happiness Studies, and we are currently also working towards future empirical and theoretical works addressing other important scientific questions in these areas.
Explore Featured Publications
Specificity in the study of mixed emotions: A theoretical framework
Vincent Y. S. Oh and Eddie M. W. Tong (2022)
Research on mixed emotions is yet to consider emotion-specificity, the idea that same-valence emotions have distinctive characteristics and functions. This research proposes a novel theoretical framework of mixed-emotions-specificity with three foundational tenets: (a) Mixed emotions are distinguishable from single-valenced emotions and other mixed emotions based on their emotion-appraisal relationships; (b) Mixed emotions can further be characterised by four patterns that describe relationships between simultaneous appraisals or appraisals that are unique to mixed emotions; and (c) Carryover effects occur only on outcomes that are associated with the appraisal characteristics of mixed emotion.
Money matters for future well-being: A latent growth analysis and meta-analytic integration of associations between income, financial satisfaction, and 22 well-being variables across three datasets
Vincent Y. S. Oh (2025)
Are subjective or objective indicators of money more strongly associated with well-being in the short- and long term? The present research revisits this practically important question using a multi data, multi outcome, longitudinal approach to comprehensively examine whether income and financial satisfaction would be associated with short-term and long-term well-being. This study examined whether individual differences in income and financial satisfaction would be associated with individual differences in well-being or to changes in well-being over time, and analysed whether changes in income or financial satisfaction could be predicted by individual differences in well-being. Lastly, it examined whether changes in income and financial satisfaction would covary with changes in well-being.
Torn between valences? Associations between mixed emotions and well-being in stressful and non-stressful situations in a large-scale ecological momentary assessment study.
Vincent Y. S. Oh (2025)
Using a large-scale public-sample ecological momentary assessment study (N = 710) collected across 7 days in 2020 and providing 29,820 observations, the present work examines associations between moment-to-moment and day-to-day experiences of mixed emotions with well-being among American adults and whether these relationships would be moderated by stressful situations or adverse life events.
Affect, Ambivalence, and Adjustment Lab 