Iris B. Mauss

Introduction

Iris B. Mauss is a German-American social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Professor of Psychology, director of the Emotion and Emotion Regulation Lab, and, since 2023, director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research. Her research asks a question that runs against the grain of the well-being industry: if people want to feel better, why do the things they do to feel better so often fail to make them happier? Much of her work has been on emotion regulation — how people try to change what they feel, which strategies work, and when the attempt itself backfires. She is best known outside the field for a line of studies showing that valuing happiness more strongly predicts worse emotional outcomes, including greater loneliness under stress.

Early Life and Education

Mauss was born in Krefeld, Germany, the second of four siblings, and became interested in psychology in high school. She studied psychology at the University of Trier — a place she has said she obtained through an academic lottery — and graduated with a B.A. in 1993. She then took a master's degree at Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, finishing in 1997 with highest honours. A decisive part of that training was an internship in the San Francisco Bay Area at a halfway house, helping patients move from inpatient to outpatient care; the experience, she has said, moved her away from clinical practice and toward research, because she wanted to understand the mechanisms rather than treat one person at a time. She moved to California for doctoral work at Stanford University under James Gross, completing her Ph.D. in 2005, and held a three-year predoctoral fellowship with the Bay Area NIMH Consortium in Affective Science from 2000 to 2003.

Academic and Professional Career

Mauss joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver as an assistant professor in 2005 and stayed until 2012, when she moved to UC Berkeley. At Berkeley she was assistant professor for one year, associate professor from 2013 to 2019, and professor from 2019; she holds the Thomas and Ruth Ann Hornaday Chair in Psychology (UC Berkeley Department of Psychology faculty record). She has served as associate editor of Cognition and Emotion and of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Her research has been funded by the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, and the Binational Science Foundation, including an R01 on emotion regulation and psychological health across adulthood. Her awards include the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology in social psychology (2015), fellowship in the Association for Psychological Science (2016) and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2014), the SPSP Carol and Ed Diener Award in Personality Psychology (2020), and the Society for Affective Science Mentorship Award (2024).

Major Contributions to Psychology

Response coherence in emotion

Mauss's dissertation and her 2005 paper with Levenson, McCarter, Wilhelm, and Gross addressed a foundational assumption: that an emotion is a coordinated package in which experience, expression, and physiology change together. She had women watch emotion-eliciting film clips while measuring self-reported feeling, facial expression, and autonomic activity. Subjective experience and expressive behaviour correlated strongly with each other, but both correlated only weakly with physiology. The result — that the response systems of emotion come apart more often than the concept implies — has shaped how affective scientists design studies, since it means a single measure cannot stand in for "the emotion."

The pursuit of happiness can be lonely

The work Mauss is most often cited for inverts a common assumption. In a two-week daily-diary study, participants who reported valuing happiness more strongly also reported feeling lonelier on the days they were most stressed, relative to those who valued it less. A follow-up laboratory study measured progesterone, a hormone sensitive to social bonding and isolation, after participants watched a film designed to evoke affiliation: those high in valuing happiness showed the hormonal profile associated with greater loneliness. The proposed mechanism is a standard-setting trap — people who care intensely about happiness hold happiness to a standard that ordinary life cannot meet, so ordinary good moments register as disappointments, and the disappointment is socially isolating. Her group has also shown that valuing happiness predicts more severe depressive symptoms in a sample at risk, and that the pursuit can operate outside awareness.

Strategy–situation fit and reappraisal

A second theme is that no emotion regulation strategy is good in the abstract. Working with Allison Troy and others, Mauss showed that cognitive reappraisal — reinterpreting a situation to change its emotional impact — predicts better outcomes for people facing genuinely uncontrollable stress but not for people in controllable situations, where acting on the situation is the better option. This "fit" framing challenges the field's habit of ranking strategies on a fixed ladder with reappraisal at the top. She has also studied automatic, unconscious emotion regulation, and the ways that trying to regulate without awareness differs from doing so deliberately.

Major Publications

Mauss, I. B., Levenson, R. W., McCarter, L., Wilhelm, F. H., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The tie that binds? Coherence among emotion experience, behavior, and physiology. Emotion, 5(2), 175–190.
Mauss, I. B., Savino, N. S., Anderson, C. L., Weisbuch, M., Tamir, M., & Laudenslager, M. L. (2012). The pursuit of happiness can be lonely. Emotion, 12(5), 908–912.
Mauss, I. B., Shallcross, A. J., Troy, A. S., John, O. P., Ferrer, E., Wilhelm, F. H., & Gross, J. J. (2011). Don't hide your happiness! Positive emotion dissociation, social connectedness, and psychological functioning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(4), 738–748.
Troy, A. S., Shallcross, A. J., & Mauss, I. B. (2013). A person-by-situation approach to emotion regulation: Cognitive reappraisal can either help or hurt, depending on the context. Psychological Science, 24(12), 2505–2514.
Gruber, J., Mauss, I. B., & Tamir, M. (2011). A dark side of happiness? How, when, and why happiness is not always good. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(3), 222–233.
Hopp, H., Troy, A. S., & Mauss, I. B. (2011). The unconscious pursuit of emotion regulation: Implications for psychological health. Cognition & Emotion, 25(3), 532–545.

Impact and Legacy

Mauss is one of a small group of researchers who gave the science of happiness its negative results, and her findings have been covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Psychology Today. The valuing-happiness work is frequently cited as a reason that wellbeing programmes should aim at engagement and meaning rather than at monitoring one's own mood, and it supplies the empirical backbone for arguments that positive emotion should not be treated as a target to be maximised.

The criticism is twofold. The first is methodological and applies to much of the literature, including her own: the diary and laboratory studies behind the happiness paradox typically use small samples of disproportionately female, disproportionately white, undergraduate or community participants, measure emotion by self-report, and are correlational, so the causal direction — does valuing happiness cause loneliness, or does being lonely make happiness feel more valuable and more elusive? — is not established. Effect sizes in this literature are small, and while the progesterone study adds a biological measure, it rests on a single hormonal assay in a single session. Mauss's own group has responded in part by pre-registering a replication of the strategy–situation fit finding rather than leaving it to outsiders, and the replication literature on emotion regulation more broadly has been unforgiving.

The second criticism is that her results sit in open tension with a neighbouring finding. Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues reported in 2014 that "prioritizing positivity" — deliberately arranging one's day to include positive experiences — is associated with greater well-being. Two labs in the same field thus arrive at opposite advice about the same behaviour, and the reconciliation is not obvious: Mauss's measures concern valuing the emotional state, Fredrickson's concern structuring one's time, but the popular retellings of each do not observe that distinction, and readers are often left with contradictory prescriptions. A related conceptual worry is that "fit" accounts can be difficult to falsify, since almost any outcome can be explained after the fact by describing the situation as controllable or not. Defenders of the work respond that the framework has generated testable predictions that would have failed — reappraisal should have helped uniformly under the old ranking, and it did not — and that the field's shift from "which strategy is best" to "which strategy fits which situation" is a genuine advance even if the details are still being worked out.

Learn More

Barbara Fredrickson — whose broaden-and-build theory her work on valuing happiness put to the test.
Robert W. Levenson — her collaborator on the longitudinal studies of emotion and marriage.
Ed Diener — whose subjective well-being research set the outcome measures the field uses.
Carol Ryff — whose model of psychological well-being is the main rival to hedonic accounts.

References

Mauss, I. B., & Robinson, M. D. (2009). Measures of emotion: A review. Cognition and Emotion, 23(2), 209-237.