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.

Judge-dependence in degree constructions The puzzle I will address is illustrated in (1-3): (1) a. John finds this cake tasty. b. John finds the Dom Tower tall. (2) a. I find apples tastier than bananas. b. ??I find John taller than Mary. (3) a. Roller coasters are fun for John. b. *The Dom Tower is tall for John. (1) suggests that dimensional adjective (DA) tall is judge-dependent (according to one of the diagnostics), just like predicates of personal taste (PPTs), say, tasty (Richard 2004; Anand 2009). (2) suggests that it's not the DA itself that is judge-dependent, rather it's its positive form, because comparative forms of DAs fail this test (2b) (Saebo 2009; Kennedy 2010; Paenen 2011). Moreover, (3) shows that the positive form of tall is not judge-dependent in exactly the same way as PPTs are: for example, it does not take an overt judge for-phrase. How can one account for the judge-dependence of tasty and tall in a way that would predict the contrasts in (2) and (3)? I will argue that while PPTs are intrinsically judge-dependent, the judge-dependence of DAs is an indirect result of its positive form being interpreted with respect to a judge-dependent modal standard. I will show this by comparing subjective positive DAs to (other) modal degree constructions. Moreover, I will argue that the judge-dependence of DAs is of a different nature than that of PPTs. PPTs give rise to statements whose truth is a matter of opinion rather than a matter of fact (Roller coasters are fun vs. Tolstoy wrote "War and Peace"), a property that manifests itself in a number of ways: PPTs give rise to FAULTLESS (SUBJECTIVE) DISAGREEMENT (Kölbel 2004; Lasersohn 2005 a.m.o.), embed under subjective attitude verbs like find (Saebo 2009), co-occur with judge for-/to-phrases

We discuss the semantics of prenominal "zero", as in "I have zero new emails in my inbox". We show that "zero" is not a quantifier like "no" and that giving "zero" a regular numeral semantics is possible and desirable. We formulate such an analysis and its consequences. We show that the existence of a zero numeral has profound consequences for linguistic semantics. We conclude that the fact that languages allow ascription of zero quantity to an entity provides evidence that linguistic semantics has access to what at first sight may seem like an ontological oddity: an entity with zero quantity. In other words, we will show that studying "zero" can inform us about the underlying semantic ontology of natural language.

The COVID-19 pandemic is increasing negative emotions and decreasing positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes may have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we will examine the impact of reappraisal, a widely studied and highly effective form of emotion regulation. Participants from 55 countries (expected N = 25,448) will be randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing), an active control condition, or a passive control condition. We predict that both reappraisal interventions will reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions relative to the control conditions. We further predict that reconstrual will decrease negative emotions more than repurposing, and that repurposing will increase positive emotions more than reconstrual. We hope to inform efforts to create a scalable intervention for use around the world to build resilience during the pandemic and beyond.

Words for numbers, numerals, are a special lexical class, halfway between natural and mathematical language. One would expect them to have a relatively straightforward semantics. However, during the last several decades, numerals proved to be a rich source of debate in linguistics, especially in semantics and pragmatics. The reason is that the study of numerals requires taking into account core issues such as plurality, quantification, implicature/exhaustivity, degree, modality, imprecision and cross‐linguistic variation. In this article, we provide a thorough introduction to the issues connected to numeral semantics and pragmatics. We gradually develop analyses of meanings of numerals in natural language using a multitude of analytical tools. We evaluate the competing proposals in terms of empirical coverage and predictions.