Rejection is redirection: what one psychologist's winding road to academia can teach us all

Dr Belén López-Pérez studies how we shape each other's emotions. Her own career story, full of accidental discoveries, near-misses, and hard-won resilience, turns out to be a brilliant illustration of her own research.

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Most people who become academic psychologists will tell you they always wanted to understand the human mind. Belén López-Pérez is not most people. "I ended up doing psychology accidentally," she says. The now-lecturer at the University of Manchester had spent her school years on mathematics, economics, and geography. She briefly considered English literature, then read a psychology syllabus and thought: this sounds interesting.

That instinct, following curiosity into unfamiliar territory, turns out to be something of a theme.

You can listen to the full #ISSIDINSIGHTS interview on YouTube here

The questionnaire that didn't win — and then did

In her third year of undergraduate study in Madrid, López-Pérez and a classmate noticed a competition poster from a major psychological assessment publisher. Having just completed a year of psychometrics, they decided to enter. They conducted a full systematic review of the empathy literature, consulted professors across multiple disciplines, and built a comprehensive questionnaire. Then they submitted it.

They didn't win. A year passed.

Then came an invitation to the first international conference on emotional intelligence. Still an undergraduate, López-Pérez scraped together what she could — sleeping in a university dormitory on a mattress she describes with a wince — and presented both a talk and a poster. After the session, a representative from that same publisher approached her. He had seen the questionnaire. He thought it showed real potential.

“We didn’t want to get too enthusiastic,” she says. “We hadn’t won. They hadn’t been in touch.” But the work had found its audience by a different route. The questionnaire was eventually published — and López-Pérez still remembers the surreal moment of walking into her university library as a fifth-year student and seeing it sitting on the shelf of new acquisitions. “It felt really surreal. Like — okay.”

The unspoken anxiety of 'what comes next'

The trajectory from there looks, in retrospect, like a series of fortunate turns: a prestigious government scholarship, a funded PhD, a postdoc at Plymouth, and eventually a lectureship at Manchester. But López-Pérez is candid about the texture of that journey from the inside.

"If you said I'll give you money to go back to the job-search period, I wouldn't," she says. "It was incredibly stressful." She was, as she describes it, "in between" — some institutions felt she was too research-focused; others not senior enough. The fit was never right until she found her current position at the University of Manchester.

There is an existential anxiety that tends to creep up on doctoral researchers roughly a year before they finish. It is rarely spoken about directly. What López-Pérez wants PhD students to know is that this experience - the uncertainty, the near-misses, the grinding self-doubt, is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is, for the vast majority of people who build careers in academia, simply what it feels like. "Everybody feels this," she says. And thanks to online communities, it has never been easier to find others who feel it too.

Rejection is redirection

Academic careers are structured around rejection in a way that is rarely acknowledged upfront. Papers get turned down. Grants fail. Even senior professors with decades of experience still wince when a funding decision goes the wrong way. "It stings all the time," López-Pérez says. "No matter how experienced you are."

Her response has become almost a personal philosophy. When a paper is rejected, she reads the reviews carefully, not to find things to be offended by, but to find things she might have missed.

"Rejection is redirection. There's almost always something in a review that gives you scope, to rewrite something unclear, to reanalyse the data differently, to run a study you hadn't even considered."

She learned early on that taking rejection personally was not just painful, it was counterproductive. The shift she advocates is not about suppressing feeling; it is about channelling it.

This is, it turns out, almost exactly what she researches professionally. López-Pérez's academic focus is interpersonal emotion regulation - the ways we deliberately or inadvertently shape the emotional experiences of the people around us. Her work explores everything from how we support friends through difficulty to why, sometimes, making someone feel worse in the short term is the kindest thing we can do (the "cruel to be kind" dynamic she has been investigating for over a decade).

Good collaborators, she points out, are sources of this regulation. When a rejection lands badly, a colleague who says "let's look at this differently" is doing something both personally meaningful and, it turns out, scientifically significant. Believe in your ideas, she urges, even when others don't, because in competitive academic environments, the praise we're waiting for from others may not come, or may arrive from entirely unexpected directions.

Ask López-Pérez what part of the job feels most meaningful, and she doesn't hesitate. The research. "If you removed it, I would feel very, very sad. That's what I'm so passionate about." It is hard, listening to her talk, not to notice how thoroughly her professional and personal lives have become intertwined. The questions she has spent her career investigating illuminate the very experiences she has lived through: the work that didn't win the prize but found its audience anyway, the rejections that redirected rather than stopped, the communities that made things feel possible when they might not have.

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Dr Belén López-Pérez is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Manchester, where her research focuses on interpersonal emotion regulation and AI-mediated emotional support.