The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world.
We investigated whether stereotype associations between specific emotional expressions and social categories underlie stereotypic emotion recognition biases. Across two studies, we replicated previously documented stereotype biases in emotion recognition using both dynamic (Study 1) and static (Study 2) expression displays. Stereotype consistent expressions were more quickly decoded than stereotype inconsistent expression on Moroccan and White male faces. Importantly, we found consistent and novel evidence that participants' associations between ethnicities and emotions, as measured with a newly developed emotion Implicit Association Test (eIAT), predicted the strength of their ethnicity-based stereotype biases in expression recognition. In both studies, as perceivers' level of Moroccan-anger and Dutch-sadness associations (compared with the opposite) increased, so did perceivers' tendency to decode anger more readily on Moroccan faces and sadness on White faces. The observed stereotype effect seemed to be independent of implicit prejudice (Study 2), suggesting dissociable effects of prejudices and stereotypes in expression perception.
Two studies examined when and why children (10-13 years) help ethnic in-group and out-group peers. In Study 1 (n = 163) children could help an out-group or in-group peer with a word-guessing game by entering codes into a computer. While children evaluated the out-group more negatively than the in-group, they helped out-group peers more than in-group peers. Study 2 (n = 117) conceptually replicated the findings of Study 1. Additionally the results suggest that when children endorsed the stereotype that the out-group is "less smart," this increased their intention to help out-group peers and it decreased their intention to enter codes for in-group peers. The results suggest that the specific content of a negative stereotype can guide helping responses toward out-group and in-group members. (PsycINFO Database Record
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