In the sixty years since I took my first psychology course, much has changed. Wars have begun and ended, the US population has nearly doubled, and fifty new countries appear on redrawn world maps. Nor has social psychology stood still. The Society of Experimental Social Psychology was founded in 1965; the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology followed suit the next year (later dropping Experimental from its name). In 1974, the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) was formed, building on the history of Division 8 of the American Psychological Association. The Association for Psychological Science (originally the American Psychological Society) came into being in 1988, and hosted the initial meetings of SPSP that evolved into an independent convention. These six decades establish the context for my development as a social psychologist on a path shaped by both chance and choice.

I discuss three factors that shaped my academic development: (1) trial and error process of options; (2) available opportunity structures, as well as constraining gender norms; and (3) experiencing a sense of fit between my passions and a particular setting. Though not part of graduate training in the mid-60s, gender research became my primary focus soon after I received my PhD. This was the “fit” that I was looking for, and in the subsequent decades I was able to join with a new generation of scholars to address phenomena that needed to be recognized, analyzed, and addressed. Attributions, stereotypes, and discrimination became a major focus, in studies conducted in both laboratory and field. In my gender work, as well as subsequent work on immigration, I often incorporated the more macro-level perspectives from sociology to provide a fuller account of the social phenomena of interest.

The juxtaposition of gender and emotion creates a fascinating crucible for addressing a host of important questions. As the chapters in this volume show, these questions cover a range from biology to social construction; from internal experience to stereotypes and belief systems; from individual reactions to interactional scripts and societal norms. To some, the topic of gender and emotion might seem to define a relatively simple set of questions: for example, do women and men experience emotions differently, or do they express their emotions in different ways? Yet, as inevitably is the case when one tries to frame topics of gender in terms of easy “what are the sex differences” questions, simple formulations soon give way to more complicated, multilayered issues that demand attention.

Emotion, because it is such a complex area of study in its own right, offers a challenging partnership for students of gender. The study of emotion raises questions about the nature of the experience and the form of expression. Both gender and emotion require us to look beyond the individual to the context in which behavior occurs, and more broadly, to the norms and social representations that frame those contexts. Together, these two areas of study demand much of us. Simple, unitary process explanations do not go very far in elucidating the phenomena; complexity and multilevel analyses are imperative.