This investigation examined how people's beliefs about the functionality of emotion shape their emotional response and regulatory strategies when encountering distressing events. In Study 1, we present data supporting the reliability and validity of an 8-item instrument, the Help and Hinder Theories about Emotion Measure (HHTEM), designed to assess an individual's beliefs about the functionality of emotion. Participants who more strongly endorsed a Help Theory reported greater wellbeing, emotional acceptance, and use of reappraisal to regulate emotion. Participants who more strongly endorsed a Hinder Theory reported less wellbeing and more expressive suppression and substance use. In Study 2, we demonstrate that encouraging participants to view emotion as helpful affected their physiological and regulatory response to a distressing event. Participants in the Help Theory condition showed greater physiological reactivity (SCL) during a distressing film than control participants but were more accepting of their emotional response. Shortly after the film, SCL decreased for participants in the Help Theory condition. Compared to control participants, they engaged in less suppression and reported less lingering effect of the film on their mood. Together, these studies suggest that people's theories about the functionality of emotion influence their reactivity, the strategies they adopt to regulate emotion, and their ability to rebound after distressing events.

The android Data from Star Trek admired human emotion whereas Spock viewed emotion as irrational and maladaptive. The theory that emotions fulfil adaptive functions is widely accepted in academic psychology but little is known about laypeople's theories. The present study assessed the extent to which laypeople share Data's view of emotion as helpful or Spock's view of emotion as a hindrance. We also assessed how help and hinder theory endorsement were related to reasoning, emotion regulation, and well-being. Undergraduates (N = 630) completed a stressful timed reasoning task and questionnaires that assessed their theories of emotion, emotion regulation strategies, happiness, and social support. Overall, participants viewed emotion more as a help than a hindrance. The more they endorsed the view that emotion helps, the better their reasoning scores. Endorsing a help theory also predicted the use of reappraisal which, in turn, predicted greater happiness and social support. In contrast, endorsing the view that emotion hinders was associated with emotion suppression and less social support. Thus, people's theories about the functionality of emotion may have important implications for their reasoning and emotional well-being.

Purpose

Increasing physical activity among adolescents is a public health priority. Because people are motivated to engage in activities that make them feel good, this study examined predictors of adolescents' feelings during exercise.

Method

During the 1st semester of the school year, we assessed 6th-grade students' (N = 136) cognitive appraisals of the importance of exercise. Participants also reported their affect during a cardiovascular fitness test and recalled their affect during the fitness test later that semester. During the 2nd semester, the same participants rated their affect during a moderate-intensity exercise task.

Results

Affect reported during the moderate-intensity exercise task was predicted by cognitive appraisals of the importance of exercise and by misremembering affect during the fitness test as more positive than it actually was. This memory bias mediated the association between appraising exercise as important and experiencing a positive change in affect during the moderate-intensity exercise task.

Conclusion

These findings highlight the roles of both cognitive appraisals and memory as factors that may influence affect during exercise. Future work should explore whether affect during exercise can be modified by targeting appraisals and memories related to exercise experiences.

This investigation examined how dispositional compassion and empathy were associated with prosocial behaviors and attitudes in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Every two weeks from March 22 to June 15, 2020, we fielded a survey to a new cohort of adults in the U.S. Compassion related to whether one stayed home to protect others, more hours spent staying home and distancing from others, and more frequent mask wearing in public, in the past two weeks. Compassion also related to greater perceived ability to help others who were negatively affected. Empathy related to more endorsement of understanding others' fear of COVID-19, and less endorsement of the view that others were overreacting to COVID-19. There was an interaction between empathy and political ideology, suggesting that empathy may matter for understanding others' fear among those with more conservative-leaning beliefs. Empathy also related to greater understanding that sheltering-in-place helps prevent the spread of COVID-19. Findings suggest that messaging and interventions to increase compassion and empathy may promote public health behaviors during a pandemic regardless of political orientation. Targeting empathy may be one way to reach individuals with more conservative political beliefs, and it is important to use an evidence-based approach accounting for political party differences in motivated reasoning.

Relying on feelings to guide thoughts and plans may be functional from the perspective of the individual but threaten the cohesion of social groups. Thus, liberals, who prioritize caring and fairness for individuals, may view emotion as more functional than do conservatives, who prioritize preserving social groups, hierarchies, and institutions. To test this, participants in three studies (total N = 1,355) rated political partisanship, beliefs about the functionality of emotion, and well-being. Study 3 also assessed how much participants prioritized “individualizing” versus “socially binding” values (Graham et al., 2011). Across all studies, the more liberal participants were, the more they viewed emotion as functional, despite reporting less emotional well-being. In Study 3, the link between liberalism and valuing emotion was mediated by more liberal participants’ greater endorsement of individualizing than socially binding values. These results suggest that emotion is viewed as more functional by those who prioritize the needs of individuals, but as less functional by those who prioritize the cohesion of social groups.

Background

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to the onset and exacerbation of mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety, and depression; yet stay-at-home-orders affected individuals' ability to make use of social support as a coping skill in managing distress. We aimed to evaluate how social support (emotional and instrumental) and biological sex were associated with stress, anxiety, and depression early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

Participants (n = 7256) had an average age of 50.13 years (SD = 16.75) and 51.6% were male. Using a cross-sequential design, seven cohorts of individuals completed baseline (T1) and one-month follow-up (T2) questionnaires online from March to July of 2020. We used a series of hierarchical regressions to identify types of social support (Brief-COPE, T1) associated with stress (Perceived Stress Scale-10, T1 and T2), anxiety and depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-4, T2).

Results

Greater emotional support was associated with less perceived stress, anxiety and depression (all ps < 0.001), whereas greater instrumental support predicted increased distress (all ps < 0.036) on all four outcomes. Moderation analyses revealed that greater emotional social support was associated with lower perceived stress at T1 for both women and men, with a stronger association for women relative to men. For women, greater emotional social support predicted lower anxiety.

Limitations

Self-selection may have introduced bias and participant self-report on brief measures may not have fully captured coping and distress.

Conclusions

Interventions enhancing emotional social support strategies, which appear especially important for women, might help manage enduring stressors such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Predicting and remembering emotion both rely on the episodic memory system which is constructive and subject to bias. In keeping with the common cognitive processes underlying prospection and retrospection, people show similar strengths and weaknesses when they predict how they will feel in the future and remember how they felt in the past. Recent findings reveal that people predict and remember the intensity of emotion more accurately than their overall or general emotional response, and whether emotion is overestimated or underestimated depends on how people's attention to, and appraisals about, events change over time. People's phenomenological experience differs markedly when they are predicting versus remembering emotion, however. Phenomenological cues, such as intensity and autonoetic experience, make predicted emotion a more compelling guide for decisions, even when inaccurate.

Racist systems, policies, and institutions subvert the quality of life for minoritized individuals and groups, across all indicators, from education and employment, to health, to community safety. Reforms to address systemic racism may be accelerated with greater support from allies who identify with the dominant groups that derive advantage from such systems. Although enhancing empathy and compassion for impacted individuals and groups may foster greater allyship with and support of minoritized communities, little work to date has assessed the relationships among compassion, empathy, and allyship. After reviewing current work in the area, this perspective offers insights into the utility and specific components of a compassion-based framework that can be used to combat racism, using findings from a survey study in which we investigated the relationship between validated psychometric measures of compassion and allyship with minoritized communities. Several subdomains of compassion, as measured among individuals identifying as non-Black, correlate significantly with levels of felt allyship with Black or African American communities. These findings inform recommendations for compassion-focused research, including development and testing of interventions to promote allyship, advocacy, and solidarity with minoritized groups, and support efforts to undo longstanding structural racisms that have patterned inequality in the United States.