September 2024- King of Wrath
Conversations
Author
Ana Huang is a #1 New York Times, #1 USA Today, Sunday Times, Wall Street Journal, and #1 Amazon bestselling author. Best known for her Twisted series, she writes New Adult and contemporary romance with deliciously alpha heroes, strong heroines, and plenty of steam, angst, and swoon.
Her books have been translated in over two dozen languages and featured in outlets such as Good Morning America, NPR, PEOPLE, and Cosmopolitan.
A self-professed travel enthusiast, she loves incorporating beautiful destinations into her stories and will never say no to a good chai latte.
Genre
- Diversity in Romance Novels: Race, Sexuality, Neurodivergence, Disability, and Fat RepresentationRomance novels are a billion-dollar industry within book publishing, but do these stories have diverse representation that reflect reality? This paper examines the diversity of race, sexuality, neurodivergence, disability, and fat representation in traditionally published romance novels in the USA. Various authors and titles are discussed, including a comparison between traditional publishing and self-publishing. While there has been an improvement in diverse representation in adult romance novels, there is still a large gap in the titles publishing houses are acquiring.
Health Impacts
- Romantic relationships and mental health: Investigating the role of self-expansion on depression symptoms.Close relationships have the potential to fundamentally alter relationship partners’ self-concepts and, consequently, can impact individuals’ mental health. One type of relationship-induced self-concept change is self-expansion, which describes the cognitive reorganization of the self that can occur when individuals include aspects of their partner into the self, or when they share novel and challenging activities together. In the current research, we hypothesized that greater self-expansion would be associated with fewer depression symptoms. In support of this hypothesis, across four studies using cross-sectional, dyadic, daily diary, and longitudinal methodologies, we found that self-expansion was negatively associated with depression symptoms. This association was robust and remained a significant predictor of depression symptoms when controlling for demographic factors (gender, age, relationship length; Studies 1–4) and known risk factors of depression (dysfunctional attitudes, major life stressors, self-concept clarity; Study 2). Moreover, individuals’ self-expansion negatively predicted depression symptoms at the daily level (Study 3) and longitudinally over 9 months (Study 4). These results are the first to show the link between self-expansion and depression symptoms, suggesting that self-expansion may have robust benefits for individuals, beyond improving relationship dynamics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)