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There are pronounced individual differences in the extent to which affective responses are associated with daily stressor exposure. These individual differences have implications for health and well-being. We use 21 days of daily diary data in 167 participants (mean age = 25.37, SD = 7.34; 81.44% women) and test (1) the moderating effect of flourishing on daily stressor-related negative mood and (2) the moderating effect of daily curiosity on daily stressor-related negative mood. Results indicate that people high in flourishing show lower stressor-related negative mood and that stressor-related negative mood is higher than usual on days of lower than usual curiosity. Together, these findings extend a large body of work indicating associations between stressor-related negative mood and both psychopathology and poor physical health to trait and state markers of well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persuasive messages can change people's thoughts, feelings, and actions, but these effects depend on how people think about and appraise the meaning of these messages. Drawing from research on the cognitive control of emotion, we used neuroimaging to investigate neural mechanisms underlying cognitive regulation of the affective and persuasive impact of advertisements communicating the risks of binge drinking, a significant public health problem. Using cognitive control to up‐regulate (vs. down‐regulate) responses to the ads increased: negative affect related to consequences of excessive drinking, perceived ad effectiveness, and ratings of ad self‐relevance made after a one‐hour delay. Neurally, these effects of cognitive control were mediated by goal‐congruent modulation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and distributed brain patterns associated with negative emotion and subjective valuation. These findings suggest that people can leverage cognitive control resources to deliberately shape responses to persuasive appeals, and identify mechanisms of emotional reactivity and integrative valuation that underlie this ability. Specifically, brain valuation pattern expression mediated the effect of cognitive goals on perceived message self‐relevance, suggesting a role for the brain's valuation system in shaping responses to persuasive appeals in a manner that persists over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotionally evocative messages can be an effective way to change behavior, but the neural pathways that translate messages into effects on individuals and populations are not fully understood. We used a human functional neuroimaging approach to ask how affect-, value-, and regulation-related brain systems interact to predict effects of graphic anti-smoking messages for individual smokers (both males and females) and within a population-level messaging campaign. Results indicated that increased activity in the amygdala, a region involved in affective reactivity, predicted both personal quit intentions and population-level information-seeking and this was mediated by activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a region involved in computing an integrative value signal. Further, the predictive value of these regions was moderated by expression of a meta-analytically defined brain pattern indexing emotion regulation. That is, amygdala and vmPFC activity strongly tracked with population behavior only when participants showed low recruitment of this brain pattern, which consists of regions involved in goal-driven regulation of affective responses. Overall, these findings suggest that affective and value-related brain responses can predict the success of persuasive messages and that neural mechanisms of emotion regulation can shape these responses, moderating the extent to which they track with population-level message impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional support is critical to well-being, but the factors that determine whether support attempts succeed or fail are incompletely understood. Using data from more than 1 million support interactions enacted within an online environment, we showed that emotional-support attempts are more effective when there is synchrony in the behavior of support providers and recipients reflective of shared psychological understanding. Benefits of synchrony in language used and semantic content conveyed were apparent in immediate measures of support impact (recipient ratings of support effectiveness and expressions of gratitude), as well as delayed measures of lasting change in the emotional impact of stressful life situations (recipient ratings of emotional recovery made at a 1-hr delay). These findings identify linguistic synchrony as a process underlying successful emotional support and provide direction for future work investigating support processes enacted via linguistic behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neuroimaging research has identified systems that facilitate minimizing negative emotion, but how the brain is able to transform the valence of an emotional response from negative to positive is unclear. Behavioral and psychophysiological studies suggest a distinction between minimizing reappraisal, which entails diminishing the arousal elicited by negative stimuli, and positive reappraisal, which instead changes the emotional valence of arousal from negative to positive. Here we show that successful minimizing reappraisal tracked with decreased activity in the amygdala, but successful positive reappraisal tracked with increased activity in regions involved in computing reward value, including the ventral striatum and ventromedial pFC (vmPFC). Moreover, positive reappraisal enhanced positive connectivity between vmPFC and amygdala, and individual differences in positive connectivity between vmPFC and amygdala, ventral striatum, dorsomedial pFC, and dorsolateral pFC predicted greater positive reappraisal success. These data broaden models of emotion regulation as quantitative dampening of negative emotion and identify activity in a network of brain valuation, arousal, and control regions as a neural basis for the ability to create positive meaning from negative experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of a national tragedy, important decisions are predicated on judgments of the emotional significance of the tragedy in the present and future. Research in affective forecasting has largely focused on ways in which people fail to make accurate predictions about the nature and duration of feelings experienced in the aftermath of an event. Here we ask a related but understudied question: can people forecast how they will feel in the future about a tragic event that has already occurred? We found that people were strikingly accurate when predicting how they would feel about the September 11 attacks over 1-, 2-, and 7-year prediction intervals. Although people slightly under- or overestimated their future feelings at times, they nonetheless showed high accuracy in forecasting (a) the overall intensity of their future negative emotion, and (b) the relative degree of different types of negative emotion (i.e., sadness, fear, or anger). Using a path model, we found that the relationship between forecasted and actual future emotion was partially mediated by current emotion and remembered emotion. These results extend theories of affective forecasting by showing that emotional responses to an event of ongoing national significance can be predicted with high accuracy, and by identifying current and remembered feelings as independent sources of this accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to successfully regulate emotion plays a key role in healthy development and the maintenance of psychological well-being. Although great strides have been made in understanding the nature of regulatory processes and the consequences of deploying them, a comprehensive understanding of emotion regulation that can specify what strategies are most beneficial for a given person in a given situation is still a far-off goal. In this review, we argue that moving toward this goal represents a central challenge for the future of the field. As an initial step, we propose a concrete framework that (i) explicitly considers emotion regulation as an interaction of person, situation, and strategy, (ii) assumes that regulatory effects vary according to these factors, and (iii) sets as a primary scientific goal the identification of person-, situation-, and strategy-based contingencies for successful emotion regulation. Guided by this framework, we review current questions facing the field, discuss examples of contextual variation in emotion regulation success, and offer practical suggestions for continued progress in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information sharing within social networks can catalyze widespread attitudinal and behavioral change and the chance to share information with others has been characterized as inherently valuable to people. But what are the sources of value and how might they be leveraged to promote sharing? We test ideas from the value-based virality model that the value of sharing increases when people perceive messages as more relevant to themselves and to people they know, resulting in stronger intentions to share. We extend this work by considering how sharing context--broadcasting to a wide audience or narrowcasting directly to someone--may alter these relationships. Six online studies with adults in the United States (N participants = 3,727; messages = 362; message ratings = 30,954) showed robust evidence that self and social relevance are positively and uniquely related to sharing intentions within- and between-person. Specification curve analysis showed these relationships were consistent across message content (COVID-19, voting, general health, climate change), medium (social media post and news articles), and sharing context (broad- and narrowcasting). A preregistered experiment showed that manipulating the self and social relevance of messages through a framing manipulation causally increased sharing intentions. These causal effects were mediated by changes in both self and social relevance, but the relative strength of the causal pathways differed depending on sharing context. These findings extend existing models of information sharing, and highlight self and social relevance as psychological mechanisms that motivate information sharing that can be targeted to promote sharing across contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]