Complexity without collapse
Social experience often contains multiple evaluations, identities, expectations, and interpretations that cannot be reduced to one simple positive-or-negative category.
Mixed feelings are still meaningful.
Perception is situated.
Roles shape interaction.
Institutions shape possibilities.
Four research areas
Explore mixed evaluations in romantic relationships, positive and negative feelings, expectations, sacrifice, appreciation, relationship satisfaction, partner perception, and relational experience.
Study social cognition, attitudes, evaluative conflict, decision-making, trust, contextual effects, subjective experience, and how people interpret social information.
Examine professional roles, organizational expectations, institutional identities, authority, academic careers, inequality, evaluation systems, and power.
Explore interviews, lived accounts, symbolic interaction, categorization, professional relations, positionality, context, interpretation, and qualitative social research.
Paired readings
Relationship science
Consider: affection, frustration, satisfaction, conflict, expectations, sacrifice, interdependence, perception.
Research distinction: Ambivalence is not necessarily indifference.
Boundary: Mixed relationship evaluations do not by themselves indicate relationship dysfunction or prescribe what any person should do.
Social cognition
Consider: attitudes, evaluative conflict, confidence, judgment, context, automatic responses, deliberative responses, subjective experience.
Research distinction: Ambivalence and uncertainty are related concepts but are not automatically interchangeable.
Boundary: Experimental measures of evaluation represent defined psychological constructs and should not be treated as complete descriptions of a person.
Sociology
Consider: professional expectations, organizational authority, career structures, evaluation systems, gender dynamics, social categories, power, identity.
Research distinction: Personal experience occurs within organizational structures without being completely determined by them.
Boundary: Qualitative accounts reveal situated interpretations rather than a single universal explanation of institutional life.
The Coexistence Method
Specify exactly which evaluations, identities, expectations, or perspectives are being compared.
Do not assume that one dimension is simply the reverse of another.
Ask whose perception, evaluation, or account is being studied.
Relationships, laboratories, organizations, institutions, and social groups create different interpretive conditions.
Norms and expectations can influence how situations are evaluated.
Consider whether another social, cognitive, relational, or institutional explanation fits the evidence.
Do not generalize from one sample, relationship context, experimental condition, interview set, or institution beyond what the evidence supports.
Educational reference points
These profiles are presented as educational reference points for exploring public academic work. They are not presented as members, employees, partners, collaborators, representatives, endorsers, or affiliates of Coexisting States.
The first three email addresses are platform contact addresses supplied for this site and are not presented as verified university or institutional email accounts.
The final three profiles are educational reference points based on public academic work. Their inclusion does not imply participation, collaboration, endorsement, employment, representation, or affiliation with this resource.
Relationships
Postdoctoral Fellow and Relationship Scientist
Amsterdam University Medical Centers · Department of Medical Psychology · Netherlands
Academic research on romantic relationships and social psychology, including mixed and conflicted feelings toward partners, relationship ambivalence, perceptions and misperceptions, expectations, relational experiences, relationship satisfaction, loneliness, romantic involvement, social norms, and the ways relationship experiences relate to wellbeing.
ORCID 0000-0002-2338-4225
Cognition
Professor of Social Psychology
Technical University Dresden · Germany · Research links with social and economic cognition and the University of Cologne.
Academic research on ambivalence, mixed evaluations, attitudes, social cognition, judgment, decision-making, trust, evaluative conflict, controversy, relationship evaluations, and how positive and negative reactions may coexist rather than form a single bipolar dimension.
ORCID 0000-0003-0915-0809
Institutions
Professor
University of Copenhagen · Department of Sociology · Denmark
Academic research in sociology involving institutional identities, symbolic interactionism, academic careers, organizational expectations, gender dynamics in academia, performance metrics, vulnerable groups, youth, qualitative methods, social categories, and the relationship between individuals and institutional settings.
ORCID 0000-0002-2038-0747
Relationships
FRAssociate Professor
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam · Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences · Netherlands
Academic research in social and relationship psychology concerning interdependence, close relationships, sacrifice, relationship evaluation, partner responses, interpersonal goals, relational motivation, ambivalence, and the processes through which people navigate benefits and costs in close relationships.
ORCID 0000-0002-5126-1388
Educational reference point
Cognition
Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing
University of Southern California · Department of Psychology · USC Marshall School of Business · Mind & Society Center · United States
Academic research on how people make sense of their experiences, how feelings and contextual cues influence judgment, social cognition, metacognitive experiences, processing fluency, decision-making, self-report, public opinion, subjective interpretation, and the socially situated nature of cognition.
ORCID 0000-0002-8868-7067
Educational reference point
Institutions
NMMProfessor
Copenhagen Business School · Department of Organization · Denmark
Academic research on identities, organizations, power, governance, professional relations, public-sector encounters, inequality, academic career trajectories, performance metrics, gender dynamics, organizational authority, and qualitative approaches to how institutions shape people's opportunities and social positions.
ORCID 0000-0001-6312-8894
Educational reference point
Research notes
Explore concise educational notes across relationship science, social cognition, ambivalence, judgment, institutional identity, power, qualitative methods, and social interpretation.
10 notes
Explore why mixed evaluations are not necessarily contradictions.
Positive evaluation, negative evaluation, independent dimensions, mixed feelings, attitudes, relational experiences, context, intensity, evaluative conflict, simultaneous reactions, measurement, and interpretation show why reducing all evaluation to a single good-to-bad continuum can hide meaningful complexity.
Separate mixed evaluation from the absence of strong evaluation.
Positive and negative reactions, relationship satisfaction, closeness, conflict, emotional investment, indifference, interdependence, expectations, partner evaluation, measurement, and context clarify why experiencing both positive and negative feelings is conceptually different from experiencing little of either.
Explore interpretation, expectations, attribution, memory, and interpersonal context.
Partner perception, expectations, attribution, misperception, communication, memory, relationship history, individual differences, social norms, reciprocal influence, and self-report explain why researchers distinguish an individual's perception from independently observed characteristics or another person's account.
Explore contextual cues, subjective experience, framing, and social evaluation.
Judgment, contextual information, prior questions, comparison standards, mood and feelings at a conceptual level, processing experience, available information, interpretation, social cognition, self-report, and framing illustrate why immediate judgments may still depend on their situation.
Explore the difference between mixed evaluation and difficulty choosing.
Ambivalent attitudes, positive and negative evaluation, decision conflict, uncertainty, confidence, available options, importance, consequences, information search, and context show why someone can hold mixed evaluations while still making a clear decision—or hold a one-sided evaluation while remaining uncertain.
Explore processing experience and the use of subjective cues in judgment.
Processing fluency, familiarity, ease, difficulty, subjective experience, context, judgment, memory, interpretation, confidence, and source information help explain why people may sometimes use the experience of thinking as information about what they are thinking about.
Explore roles, expectations, categories, recognition, and organizational context.
Professional roles, institutional expectations, identity work, social categories, interaction, organizational routines, career structures, recognition, authority, professional norms, and individual agency show why professional identity is neither completely private nor completely dictated by an organization.
Explore authority, organizational practice, professional norms, and social interpretation.
Formal procedures, informal norms, organizational authority, professional relationships, discretion, social expectations, institutional categories, power, governance, interaction, and accountability show why written rules do not fully describe institutional life in practice.
Explore accounts, meaning, context, interpretation, and the limits of qualitative evidence.
Qualitative interviews, narratives, meanings, lived accounts, context, interviewer interaction, coding, themes, interpretation, variation, reflexivity, sampling, and transferability can reveal how people understand experience without claiming every account represents an entire population.
Explore the limits of comparing ambivalence across relationships, judgment, and institutions.
Relationship ambivalence, evaluative conflict, identity tension, organizational expectations, social context, units of analysis, psychological constructs, sociological concepts, measurement, qualitative evidence, mechanisms, and interpretation demonstrate why comparison must preserve differences between individual cognition, interpersonal dynamics, and institutional structure.
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About Coexisting States
Coexisting States is an independent educational prototype connecting relationship science, social cognition, and sociology of institutional identities.
It does not suggest that relationship ambivalence, cognitive evaluation, and institutional identity operate through equivalent psychological or social mechanisms.
Instead, it explores a shared methodological challenge: how to study multiple evaluations, perspectives, identities, expectations, and interpretations without forcing them prematurely into a single category.
Coexisting States is not a university, clinic, therapy service, relationship counseling service, sociology institute, psychology practice, commercial organization, fashion brand, clothing company, retailer, or commercial platform.
Positive and negative, personal and institutional, or explicit and implicit dimensions should not automatically be collapsed into one.
Every evaluation belongs to a person, group, interaction, measurement context, or institutional setting.
Expectations, norms, power, relationships, and organizational conditions can influence meaning.
A social experience can contain multiple meaningful states without being incoherent.
Keep both dimensions visible
Browse research notes, compare paired readings, and use the Coexistence Method to examine evaluations, perspectives, expectations, identities, institutional context, and alternative interpretations.