I’ve been thinking a lot about the way in which human beings police each other’s emotions and emotional responses. Often, the emotional pain others are experiencing makes us deeply uncomfortable. As a result, we may minimize, gloss over, or even criticize another person for how they feel. Yesterday, I came across a fascinating pre-print article on this subject.
Cosimano and Goodwin (2020) considers how people try to control, influence, or change the way another person regulates their emotions based on how valid they think those emotions are. In other words, if we think someone is justified for feeling upset about something, we are less likely to criticize them for the way in which they are experiencing their emotions about it. However, if we think that they are more upset than the situation warrants, we are more likely to criticize them. This holds true even when we are aware that criticizing the other person may cause them additional pain.
As I think about my own experiences, those times when another person tried to shame me for my feelings or rationalize away the reason for my hurt and upset were painful. As human beings we seem to spend an awfully large amount of time judging whether other people’s emotions are legitimate.
This paper was explicitly concerned with how individuals viewed the emotional responses of others and how they were either critical of them or not. I’m curious about how this might apply to the individuals themselves. Put differently, I wonder how we rate the legitimacy of our own feelings and how that translates into how we perceive ourselves as emotionally strong or weak.
For me, I know that it is a constant struggle to accept my emotions as valid. Instead, I want to apply a quality standard to my feelings. I’m learning to let myself feel what I feel without judgment.
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
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Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 
“Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
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