AHC Guest Lecturers
Fred Bryant	Barbara Fredrickson	Karen Reivich
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi	Shelly Gable	Barry Schwartz
Gregg Easterbrook	Christopher Peterson	George Vaillant

Shelly Gable

Shelly Gable earned her Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Rochester in 2000. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UCLA, where she conducts research on motivation and emotion in close relationships and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on social psychology, close relationships, and advanced research methods. She is the co-director of the annual Positive Psychology Summer Institute in which 20 graduate students, post-docs, and assistant professors from all over the world and the different subfields of psychology are brought together for six days to learn from each other and from a handful of more senior researchers. Dr. Gable is also currently a consulting editor for The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Journal of Personality, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. She has received grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health, the Positive Psychology Network, the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, and the UCLA Counsel of Research. In particular her research centers on understanding how approach social motives and goals (motives and goals focused on obtaining rewarding outcomes such as intimacy and companionship in relationships), differ from avoidance social motives and goals (motives and goals focused on avoiding punishing outcomes such as conflict and rejection). For example, how does the goal of "wanting to find someone to love" differ from the goal of "not wanting to be alone"? She is interested in how these motivational frameworks affect attention, cognition, affect, and behavior in establishing, maintaining, and dissolving close personal relationships. Her most recent work focuses on the positive processes in romantic relationships and friendships because the lion’s share of previous research has focused on negative processes in couples and friendships, such as disgorgements, conflicts, displays of negative emotions, and the occurrence of stressful events. For example, Dr. Gable and her colleagues have been studying how active and constructive responses to our close others’ positive events and good fortune (a process called capitalization) enhance both well-being and the quality of close relationships.

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