For better or worse, the people one lives with may exert a powerful influence on one’s mental health, perhaps especially during times of stress. The COVID-19 pandemic—a large-scale stressor that prompted health recommendations to stay home to reduce disease spread—provided a unique context for examining how the people who share one’s home may shape one’s mental health. A seven-wave longitudinal study assessed mental health month to month before and during the pandemic (February through September 2020) in two diverse samples of U.S. adults ( N = 656; N = 544). Preregistered analyses demonstrated that people living with close others (children and/or romantic partners) experienced better well-being before and during the pandemic’s first 6 months. These groups also experienced unique increases in ill-being during the pandemic’s onset, but parents’ ill-being also recovered more quickly. These findings highlight the crucial protective function of close relationships for mental health both generally and amid a pandemic.

Despite growing evidence that showing gratitude plays a powerful role in building social connections, little is known about how to best express gratitude to maximize its relational benefits. In this research, we examined how two key ways of expressing gratitude—conveying that the benefactor’s kind action met one’s needs (responsiveness-highlighting) and acknowledging how costly the action was (cost-highlighting)—impact benefactors’ reactions to the gratitude and feelings about their relationship. Using observer ratings of gratitude expressions during couples’ live interactions ( N = 111 couples), and benefactors’ self-reports across a 14-day experience sampling study ( N = 463 daily reports), we found that responsiveness-highlighting was associated with benefactors’ positive feelings about the gratitude expression and the relationship. In contrast, cost-highlighting had no such effect. These findings suggest that expressing gratitude in a way that highlights how responsive benefactors were may be critical to reaping the relational benefits of gratitude and have practical implications for improving couples’ well-being.

Sleep is an important predictor of social functioning. However, questions remain about how impaired sleep-which is common and detrimental to affective and cognitive functions necessary for providing high quality support-is linked to both the provision and perception of support, especially at the daily level. We tested links between impaired sleep and provided and perceived support in romantic couples, and whether these links were mediated by negative affect and perspective-taking. In preregistered analyses of two 14-day diary studies (Study 1 N = 111 couples; Study 2 N = 100 couples), poor daily subjective sleep quality-but not duration-was associated with less self-reported support toward a partner (in both studies), less perceived support from a partner and less partner-reported support (in Study 1), and partner perceptions of receiving less support (in Study 2). Only greater daily negative affect consistently mediated the association between participants' impaired sleep (i.e., poor subjective sleep quality and duration) and their own support provision, as well as their partner's perceptions of received support. Our findings suggest that the effect of sleep on social processes may be strongest for self-reported measures of support, and that unique aspects of sleep might be differentially associated with social outcomes given that sleep quality-but not duration-was consistently linked to support outcomes. These findings highlight the psychosocial influences of sleep and negative affect and may inform approaches to promote supportive partner interactions.

The COVID-19 pandemic not only threatens physical health, but is also a multi-faceted stressor that threatens mental health. Given the public health focus on staying home to stem the tide of COVID-19, it is crucial to determine how the close others we live with (i.e., romantic partners or children) affect our mental health, for better or worse. We examined the month-to-month mental health (i.e., well-being and ill-being) of parents living with child(ren) and people living with romantic partners (versus people not living with these close others) from February through September 2020 in two diverse samples of U.S. adults (N=656; N=544). This longitudinal approach distinguishes three unique effects: differences existing before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, differences due to the onset of the pandemic, and differences that persisted across the first six months of the pandemic. In both samples, living with child(ren) or living with a romantic partner were both protective for mental health, before and during the first six months of the pandemic. Some evidence suggests these groups experienced unique increases in ill-being during the onset of the pandemic, but their ill-being also recovered more quickly. These findings highlight the crucial protective function of close relationships for mental health both in general and amidst a pandemic, suggesting that people living without these close others may need additional support.

Urgent societal problems, including climate change, require innovation and can benefit from interdisciplinary solutions. A small body of research has demonstrated the potential of positive emotions (e.g., gratitude, awe) to promote creativity and prosocial behavior, which may help address these problems. This study integrates, for the first time, psychology research on a positive and prosocial emotion (i.e., gratitude) with engineering-design creativity research. In a pre-registered study design, engineering students and working engineers (pilot N = 49; full study N = 329) completed gratitude, positive-emotion control, or neutral-control inductions. Design creativity was assessed through rater scores of responses to an Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and a Wind-Turbine-Blade Repurposing Task (WRT). No significant differences among AUT scores emerged across conditions in either sample. While only the pilot-study manipulation of gratitude was successful, WRT results warrant further studies on the effect of gratitude on engineering-design creativity. The reported work may also inform other strategies to incorporate prosocial emotion to help engineers arrive at more original and effective concepts to tackle environmental sustainability, and in the future, other problems facing society.