The COVID-19 pandemic presents a significant challenge to wellbeing for people around the world. Here, we examine which individual and societal factors can predict the extent to which individuals suffer or thrive during the COVID-19 outbreak, with survey data collected from 26,684 participants in 51 countries from 17 April to 15 May 2020. We show that wellbeing is linked to an individual's recent experiences of specific momentary positive and negative emotions, including love, calm, determination, and loneliness. Higher socioeconomic status was associated with better wellbeing. The present study provides a rich map of emotional experiences and wellbeing around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak, and points to calm, connection, and control as central to our wellbeing at this time of collective crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a significant challenge to wellbeing for people around the world. Here, we examine which individual and societal factors can predict the extent to which individuals suffer or thrive during the COVID-19 outbreak, with survey data collected from 26,684 participants in 51 countries from 17 April to 15 May 2020. We show that wellbeing is linked to an individual’s recent experiences of specific momentary positive and negative emotions, including love, calm, determination, and loneliness. Higher socioeconomic status was associated with better wellbeing. The present study provides a rich map of emotional experiences and wellbeing around the world during the COVID-19 outbreak, and points to calm, connection, and control as central to our wellbeing at this time of collective crisis.

This study aimed to (1) investigate the variation in self ascription to gender roles and attitudes toward gender roles across countries and its associations with crying behaviors, emotion change, and beliefs about crying and (2) understand how the presence of others affects our evaluations of emotion following crying. This was a large international survey design study (N = 893) conducted in Australia, Croatia, the Netherlands, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Analyses revealed that, across countries, gender, self-ascribed gender roles, and gender role attitudes (GRA) were related to behavioral crying responses, but not related to emotion change following crying. How a person evaluates crying, instead, appeared to be highly related to one’s beliefs about the helpfulness of crying, irrespective of gender. Results regarding crying when others were present showed that people are more likely both to cry and to feel that they received help around a person that they know, compared to a stranger. Furthermore, closeness to persons present during crying did not affect whether help was provided. When a crier reported that they were helped, they also tended to report feeling better following crying than those who cried around others but did not receive help. Few cross-country differences emerged, suggesting that a person’s responses to crying are quite consistent among the countries investigated here, with regard to its relationship with a person’s gender role, crying beliefs, and reactions to the presence of others.

A perceiver’s socioeconomic status (SES) should influence social perceptions toward others. However, there is little evidence for this effect within and beyond Western samples. We hence evaluate the relationship between perceiver SES and dehumanized perception in a society where status is historically defined: India. Across two studies, we hypothesized that perceiver SES would predict dehumanization toward societal outcasts—beggars—and norm violators. Replicating previous work, in Study 1, upper SES perceivers dehumanized beggars more than lower SES perceivers; accounted for by low self-reported contact likelihood. In Study 2, norm violators were perceived as less human but more so by lower rather than upper SES perceivers. This novel finding was partially explained by perceivers viewing female violators as less prototypical, aligned with theorizing in gender research. Our results indicate that SES influences dehumanization via contact likelihood as well as the perceived normativity of a targets’ behavior.

People do not always show how they feel; norms often dictate when to display emotions and to whom. Norms about emotional expressions-known as display rules-are weaker for happiness than for negative emotions, suggesting that expressing positive emotions is generally seen as acceptable. But does it follow that all positive emotions can always be shown to everyone? To answer this question, we mapped out context-specific display rules for 8 positive emotions: gratitude, admiration, interest, relief, amusement, feeling moved, sensory pleasure, and triumph. In four studies with participants from five countries (n = 1,181), two consistent findings emerged. First, display rules differed between positive emotions. Weaker display rules were found for gratitude, interest, and amusement, whereas stronger display rules were found for sensory pleasure, feeling moved, and to some degree triumph. Second, contextual features-such as expresser location and perceiver relationship-both substantially influenced display rules for positive emotions, with perceiver relationship having a greater impact on display rules than expresser location. Our findings demonstrate that some positive emotions are less acceptable to express than others and highlight the central role of context in influencing display rules even for emotions that feel good. In so doing, we provide the first map of expression norms for specific positive emotions.