Amit GoldenbergHarvard University | Harvard
Amit Goldenberg
Doctor of Philosophy
About
66
Publications
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Introduction
I am an assistant professor at Harvard Business School (NOM) and a psychologist by training. My research is focused on understanding the unfolding and regulation of the emotional processes that shape group behavior. One line of my work is focused on the regulation of emotions in groups. A second is focused on emotional dynamics between group members and the regulation of such dynamics. A third pays specific attention to emotional dynamics on social media.
To test theoretically derived hypotheses in these three lines of work, I employ a multi-method approach that integrates behavioral experiments, analysis of data from digital media, and computational modeling.
My site: https://amitgoldenberg.com/
Publications
Publications (66)
Scholars interested in emotion regulation have documented the different goals and strategies individuals have for regulating their emotions. However, little attention has been paid to the regulation of group-based emotions, which are based on individuals' self-categorization as a group member and occur in response to situations perceived as relevan...
From the earliest days of psychology, emotions largely have been conceptualized as individual-level phenomena. Even when trying to understand the emotions of groups, psychologists generally have tended to focus on the experience of each individual group member. Recently, however, there has been growing interest in exploring emotions at the collecti...
People spend considerable time on digital media during which they are frequently exposed to numerous expressions of emotions. These emotions can lead to emotion contagion, in which the exposure to others’ emotions makes one’s own emotions become more similar to others’ emotions. This paper reviews the growing literature on digital emotion contagion...
When analyzing situations in which multiple people are experiencing emotions together – whether the emotions are positive or negative, and whether the situations are online or offline – we are intuitively drawn to the emotions of each individual in the situation. However, this type of analysis often seems incomplete. In many of the cases in which p...
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...
What is it to be “an ideal parent”? Does the answer differ across countries and social classes? To answer these questions in a way that minimizes bias and ethnocentrism, we used open-ended questions to explore ideal-parent beliefs among 8,357 mothers and 3,517 fathers from 37 countries. Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis was utilized to first det...
Social media users tend to produce content that contains more positive than negative emotional language. However, negative emotional language is more likely to be shared. To understand why, research has thus far focused on psychological processes associated with the content of tweets. In the current study, we investigate if the content producer inf...
Political segregation is an important social problem, increasing polarization and impeding effective governance. Previous work has viewed the central driver of segregation to be political homophily, the tendency to associate with others who have similar views. Here we propose that, in addition to homophily, people’s social tie decisions are driven...
People’s ability to regulate emotions is crucial to healthy emotional functioning and a central focus of clinical psychology. One overlooked aspect in emotion regulation research is that knowledge about the source of emotions can vary across situations and individuals, which could impact one’s ability for emotion regulation. Using Ecological Moment...
When people experience emotions in a group, their emotions tend to have stronger intensity and to last longer, why is that? This question has occupied thinkers throughout history and with the increased use of digital media it is even more pressing than ever. Historically, attention has focused on the amplification driven by the way emotions are com...
When we think of emotion and emotion regulation, we typically think of them as processes occurring at the individual level. Even when emotions are experienced by multiple people who interact with each other, analysis is typically centered around individual-level processes. Recently, however, there is a growing realization that there is unique value...
Purpose The prevalence of parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children, varies dramatically across countries and is highest in Western countries characterized by high individualism.
Method In this study, we examined the mediators of the relationship between individualism measured at the country level and...
Loneliness, a negative emotion stemming from the perception of unmet social needs, is a major public health concern. Current interventions often target social domains but produce small effects and are not as effective as established emotion regulation (ER)-based interventions for general psychological distress (i.e., depression/anxiety). Given that...
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...
Does the racial composition of a crowd affect judgments about the group’s emotionality? In Experiments 1-2, we showed participants crowds of faces expressing different degrees of happiness or anger, manipulating the ratio of lighter-skinned faces racialized as White and darker-skinned faces racialized as Black. Greater proportion of Black faces inc...
Social interactions are dynamic and unfold over time. To make sense of social interactions, people must aggregate sequential information into summary, global evaluations. But how do people do this? Here, to address this question, we conducted nine studies (N = 1,583) using a diverse set of stimuli. Our focus was a central aspect of social interacti...
Objectives: Parental burnout is a prevalent condition that affects parents’ functioning and health. While various protective factors have been examined, little is known about their interplay. In the current study, we examined the joint effect of two protective factors against parental burnout (one external—social support, and one internal—cognitive...
Background
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has received empirical support as a viable treatment alternative for treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. Nevertheless, patients and the public-at-large may be hesitant to adopt rTMS. In three studies, we sought to (1) assess and (2) improve public perceptions of rTMS as a tre...
Background
Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one's quality of life. However, positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video communication platforms (eg Zoom and Twitch) may offer an engaging and accessible medium to d...
In Western countries, recent decades have witnessed a revolution toward gender equality. Inequalities have been greatly reduced in areas such as education or employment. Because inequalities lead to distress, this development has largely benefited women. One notable exception is the realm of parenting, which has remained rife with inequalities even...
BACKGROUND
Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one’s quality of life. Positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video communication platforms (eg, Zoom and Twitch) may offer an engaging and accessible medium to deliver s...
What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project extends existing knowledge by examining the spread of emotional language in response to both pred...
Negativity has historically dominated news content; however, little research has examined how news organizations use affect on social media, where content is generally positive. In the current project we ask a few questions: Do news organizations on Twitter use negative or positive language and which type of affect garners more engagement on social...
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...
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...
Social interactions are dynamic, and unfold over time. To make sense of social interactions, people must aggregate sequential information into summary, global evaluations. But how do people do this? To address this question, we conducted 9 studies (N= 1,583), using a diverse set of stimuli. Our focus was a central aspect of social interaction, name...
Loneliness is a risk factor for mental disorders and is a significant and growing public health issue, but to date, loneliness interventions have had limited success. We propose that an emotion regulation perspective might be useful for understanding loneliness and for suggesting new treatment targets. In this study, our aim was to test the basis f...
Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? Although traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in individuals’ idiosyncratic cognitive and affective dispositions. This article synthesizes cutting-e...
High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study, we examined the prevalence of parental burnout in 42 countries (17,409 parents; 71...
Negativity has historically dominated news content; however, little research has examined how news organizations use affect on social media, where content is generally positive. In the current project we ask a few questions: Do news organizations on Twitter use negative or positive language and which type of affect garners more engagement on social...
What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project addressed the gap introduced when looking only at negative situations by comparing the spread of...
High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study, we examined the prevalence of parental burnout in 42 countries (17,409 parents; 71...
Political segregation is a significant social problem in the US, increasing polarization, sowing division and discord, and impeding effective governance. A central driver of segregation is political homophily, the tendency to associate with others with similar political views. In the current paper we propose that, in addition to political homophily...
Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? While traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity attributes, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in individuals’ idiosyncratic cognitive and affective dispositions. This paper synthesizes cut...
How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people catch a brief glimpse of an array of faces, they can only focus their attention on some of the faces. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong emotions, and that this generates a crowd emotion amplification effect—estimating a...
How does the competitive relation between ideological groups shape group members’ emotional responses to their shared political reality? Inspired by the social identity approach, we propose that ideological in-group members adjust their emotional responses to political stimuli based on the perceived emotional response of their ideological out-group...
Previous thinking on emotions has often categorized them as either pleasant or unpleasant or examined to what extent they are functional versus dysfunctional. We suggest that researchers should consider the positivity or negativity of discrete emotions on both dimensions: subjective feelings and constructiveness of outcomes. We discuss how, across...
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. Pa...
Within contexts of oppression and struggle for social change, in which hope is constantly challenged, do disadvantaged group members still want to feel hope? If so, does this desire translate into actual hope? And does motivation for hope relate to disadvantaged individuals’ collective action tendencies? We suggest that, especially when faced with...
Lay abstract:
In this study, we examined parental reflective functioning using the Parental Developmental Interview when parents were talking about their interactions with their child with autism versus the child's typically developing siblings. Our sample included 30 parents who had a child between the ages of 3 and 18 years with a clinical diagn...
How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people are briefly exposed to an array of faces, they can only sample a subset of them. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to more emotional faces and that this generates a crowd emotion amplification effect—estimating a crowd’s average emotional response...
People spend considerable time on digital media, and are thus often exposed to expressions of emotion by other people. This exposure can lead their own emotion expressions becoming more similar to those of others, a process we refer to as 'digital emotion contagion'. This article reviews the growing literature on digital emotion contagion. After de...
When exposed to others' emotional responses, people often make rapid decisions as to whether these others are members of their group or not. These group categorization decisions have been shown to be extremely important to understanding group behavior. Yet, despite their prevalence and importance, we know very little about the attributes that shape...
It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. However, people do not always express emotions that are similar to other group members, and the factors that determine when similarity occurs are not yet clear. In the current project, we examined whether certain situations activate specific...
People have a remarkable ability to aggregate emotional expressions of individuals in a group into summary statistics (a capacity known as ensemble coding). What is not yet clear, however, is how ensemble coding of others’ emotions affects self-categorization as part of that group. To address this question, we developed a task designed to reveal th...
It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. It is not yet clear, however, whether and to what extent situations that activate emotional motives influence this tendency to show emotional similarity. In the present research, we examined this issue by considering emotional responses to po...
It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. It is not yet clear, however, whether and to what extent situations that activate emotional motives influence this tendency to show emotional similarity. In the present research, we examined this issue by considering emotional responses to po...
Research shows that cognitive reappraisal is an effective emotion regulation (ER) strategy that often has clear benefits. Yet, surprisingly, recent findings demonstrate that people use cognitive reappraisal less frequently than might be expected (Suri, Whittaker & Gross, 2015). We employ cognitive energetics theory (CET) to explain this puzzling be...
Research shows that cognitive reappraisal is an effective emotion regulation (ER) strategy that often has clear benefits. Yet, surprisingly, recent findings demonstrate that people use cognitive reappraisal less frequently than might be expected (Suri, Whittaker & Gross, 2015). We employ cognitive energetics theory (CET) to explain this puzzling be...
Dehumanization is the denial of full human potential to an individual or a social group. Although it is widely seen as a grave social ill, the psychological roots of dehumanization are not yet clear. In the present research, we examined the role of agency and communion. These dimensions are pivotal to how we perceive other people, and we hypothesiz...
Significance
The importance of psychological factors in conflict resolution has been well established in laboratory experiments. However, these factors have rarely been examined in longitudinal field experiments. The goal of the current project was to address this gap by comparing the effectiveness of psychological interventions during a period of...
Our emotional responses to the events around us are often shaped by the emotional responses of other group members. Thus far, much of the research examining this type of social influence has been focused on situations that lead to emotional similarity between group members. In the present research, we extend prior work by examining situations in wh...
Even in the extreme context of intractable conflict, individuals sometimes risk sanctions and other negative outcomes when they reveal information. This chapter examines self-censorship as a barrier to conflict resolution in this unique context, focusing on the process involved in breaking the silence as the result of successfully overcoming this b...
Much of what is currently known about the emotional dimension of parental interactions concerns the role of congruent processes, in which partners experience similar emotions. Far less is known about non-congruent processes, in which partners regulate their emotions to balance out their partner's emotional responses. We define such “balancing out”...
For decades, increasing intergroup contact has been the preferred method for improving cooperation between groups. However, even proponents of this approach acknowledge that intergroup contact may not be effective in the context of intractable conflicts. One question is whether anything can be done to increase the impact of intergroup contact on co...
Intergroup reconciliation is a requirement for lasting peace in the context of intergroup conflicts. In this
article, we offer an emotion regulation perspective on social-psychological interventions aimed at
facilitating intergroup reconciliation. In the first section of the article, we conceptualize intergroup
reconciliation as an emotion-regulati...
Dehumanizing the enemy is one of the most destructive elements of intergroup conflict. Past research demonstrated that awareness of harm that the in-group imposed on a specific out-group can increase out-group dehumanization as means of justifying the harm. In this research, we examined whether the opposite process would occur when people become aw...
Intergroup conflict encompasses a broad range of situations with moral relevance. Researchers at the intersection of social and moral psychology employ diverse methodologies, including surveys, moral dilemmas, economic games, and neuroimaging, to study how individuals think, feel, and act in intergroup moral encounters. We review recent research pe...
Extensive research has established the pivotal role that group-based emotions play in shaping intergroup processes. The underlying implicit assumption in previous work has been that these emotions reflect what the rest of the group feels (i.e., collective emotions). However, one can experience an emotion in the name of her group, which is inconsist...
Intractable conflicts pose a great challenge to both humanity and science. The crucial role played by intergroup emotions in conflict dynamics has long been asserted in the field of conflict resolution. Therefore, regulating emotions in order to change attitudes and behaviour towards promoting peace is vital. One way to transform emotions is to use...
This chapter explores the effects of early adverse experiences by reporting on long-term outcomes of childhood trauma. It focuses on physical abuse by the child's parent. The chapter covers a more psychologically severe form of abuse: attacks by someone from whom the dependent child expects protection and caring. It compares the outcomes at 30 year...
Projects
Projects (2)
The goal of this project is to create a framework that would allow social scientists to theorize about, conduct experiments on, and build computational models of collective emotions.
Research shows that cognitive reappraisal is an effective emotion regulation (ER) strategy that often has clear benefits. Yet, surprisingly, recent findings demonstrate that people use cognitive reappraisal less frequently than might be expected (Suri, Whittaker & Gross, 2015). We employ the Cognitive Energetics Theory (CET) to explain this puzzling behavior. CET posits that the likelihood of launching any cognitive process is a function of two opposing forces: the driving force (i.e., the motivation to launch the process) and the restraining force (i.e., task difficulty). We thus hypothesized that people choose to use cognitive reappraisal relatively rarely because of the difficulty of implementing it. We also postulated that the decision to reappraise (or not) does not simply depend on the stimuli emotional intensity because the latter is associated with both the driving and the restraining forces. In support of our hypotheses, we found that the more intense negative images were perceived as requiring more emotion regulation (Study 1), but also as more difficult to reappraise (Study 2). Furthermore, when the association between the images’ intensity and the difficulty of reappraising was reduced by asking participants to merely predict others’ (Study 3) or their own choices (Study 4), the images’ intensity predicted the reappraisal choices better than when participants had to actually implement their reappraisal choices. Finally, in Study 5, we showed the images’ intensity predicted the reappraisal choices better for a relatively easy (vs. difficult) reappraisal strategy. These findings illustrate the relevance of a CET-based motivational analysis to emotion regulation choice.