David B Newman

Loma Linda University · Department of Psychology

Nostalgia is a mixed emotion. Recent empirical research, however, has highlighted positive effects of nostalgia, suggesting it is a predominantly positive emotion. When measured as an individual difference, nostalgia-prone individuals report greater meaning in life and approach temperament. When manipulated in an experimental paradigm, nostalgia in...

Perceiving life as meaningful can buffer against negative experiences, whereas searching for meaning in life is often associated with negative outcomes. We examined how these individual differences, along with religiosity and political orientation, are associated with feelings and health-related behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic ( N = 7,220; U...

Experimental manipulations of nostalgia that privilege positive aspects of the bittersweet emotion have led to the conclusion that nostalgia is a predominantly positive emotion, yet nostalgia covaries negatively with well-being in daily life. To reconcile this discrepancy, we developed and tested the bittersweet variation model of nostalgia that po...

Prayer is an important aspect of many people's daily lives, yet little is known about the relationships between prayer and daily experiences and well-being in ecologically valid settings. In three studies, participants (N = 350) completed questionnaires once a day for 2 weeks (4,437 daily reports) regarding the events they experienced each day, the...

Paced breathing—longer exhalation than inhalation—can show short-term improvement of physiologic responses and affective well-being, though most studies have relied on narrow sample demographics, small samples, and control conditions that fail to address expectancy effects. We addressed these limitations through an app-based experiment where partic...

A large body of research has examined the relationship between belief in a just world (BJW) and well-being. However, this research, and work on BJW more broadly, has predominantly employed experimental and cross-sectional methods, which may not adequately capture how BJW functions in daily life. To help address this, we considered how two forms of...

Gratitude has been studied in the context of human social relationships primarily, but relatively less is known about gratitude in relation to a deity. We extended this research by studying gratitude among Muslim American adolescents, an understudied population, by comparing feelings of gratitude to Allah with feelings of gratitude to people in the...

Much of the research on meaning in life has relied on global evaluations or trait reports in which people consider their life as a whole. While informative, these types of reports fail to capture how one's sense of meaning and purpose in life may change from one time to the next. In fact, Viktor Frankl argued that the meaning of one's life can chan...

Prior research on eco-anxiety, or anxiety and worry about mounting environmental issues, has almost exclusively relied on cross-sectional trait reports. Consequently, little is known about how it is related to focal outcomes, such as well-being (e.g., happiness, meaning in life) and pro-environmental behavior, over time in daily life. To help addre...

A growing body of research has focused on distinguishing general forms of gratitude from gratitude to God. We contributed to this area of research by examining correlates of personality traits and meaning in life in a cross-sectional study (N = 1,398). General gratitude was more strongly positively related to honesty-humility, extraversion, conscie...

Background Sleep can have consequential effects on people’s health and well-being, and these effects may vary among younger and older adults. Purpose The goal of the present study was to investigate how sleep relates to physiologic and stress responses in daily life across adulthood. Methods We used an Ecological Momentary Assessment method in a...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02185.].

We address the long-standing confusion concerning the conceptualization and structure of subjective well-being (SWB) by examining daily variation in life satisfaction (LS), positive affect (PA), and negative affect (NA). A total of 911 participants provided daily ratings of LS, PA, and NA over 14 days. Between- and within-individual variations in d...

With the proliferation of technology-based communication, public expressions of gratitude to God on social media have become more pervasive. At the same time, data science approaches are increasingly being applied to social media language data to assess positive human attributes. We elucidate critical considerations in assessing public expressions...

Objective: The present study sought to examine: (1) how the components of authenticity (i.e., authentic living, self-alienation, accepting external influence) relate to one another at between- and within-person levels of analysis; (2) how the authenticity facets relate to meaning in life (i.e., purpose, comprehension, mattering) and life satisfact...

Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for the past that can influence people's well-being. How this mixed emotion influences well-being may depend on current life circumstances. Nostalgia elicited in negative contexts could be particularly harmful to people's well-being, whereas nostalgia elicited in positive contexts may not be as detrimental. This h...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s42761-022-00112-x.].

Sleep is an important process that can influence and be influenced by daily events and emotions. We examined the bidirectional relationships between sleep, daily events, and emotions with a daily diary method completed by 181 mothers (M age = 41.91, SD = 5.06). They answered morning and evening questionnaires for 1 week at three different points in...

We examined within-person relationships among daily events, emotion regulation strategies, and well-being in daily life. Each day for 2 to 3 weeks, participants in two studies (total N = 445) reported the extent to which they reappraised and suppressed their positive and negative emotions, the types of events they experienced, and their well-being....

Gratitude and optimism are positive psychological dispositions associated with beneficial outcomes. To examine their associations with physiological and psychological experiences in daily life, we examined data from an Ecological Momentary Assessment study (N = 4,825), including blood pressure, heart rate, and reports of stress, health behaviors, a...

Background: Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has the potential to minimize recall bias by having people report on their experiences in the moment (momentary model) or over short periods (coverage model). This potential hinges on the assumption that participants provide their ratings based on the reporting time frame instructions prescribed in...

BACKGROUND Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) has the potential to minimize recall bias by having people report on their experiences in the moment (momentary model) or over short periods of time (coverage model). This potential hinges on the assumption that participants provide ratings based on the reporting timeframe instructions prescribed in...

Background Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has the potential to minimize recall bias by having people report on their experiences in the moment (momentary model) or over short periods (coverage model). This potential hinges on the assumption that participants provide their ratings based on the reporting time frame instructions prescribed in t...

Research has suggested that nostalgia is a mixed, albeit predominantly positive emotion. One proposed function of nostalgia is to attenuate the negative consequences of loneliness. This restorative effect of nostalgia, however, has been demonstrated with cross sectional and experimental methods that lack ecological validity. In studies that have me...

Researchers can characterize people’s well-being by asking them to provide global evaluations of large parts of their life at one time or by obtaining repeated assessments during their daily lives. Global evaluations are reconstructions that are influenced by peak, recent, and frequently occurring states, whereas daily reports reflect naturally occ...

We conducted a survey about the 2014 FIFA World Cup that measured attitudes about FIFA, players, and officials in 18 languages with 4600 respondents from 29 countries. Sixty percent of respondents perceived FIFA officials as being dishonest, and people from countries with less institutional corruption and stronger rule of law perceived FIFA officia...

The goal of the present study was to examine differences in the daily experiences of vegetarians and non-vegetarians. At the end of each day for two weeks, a convenience sample of American undergraduates described how they felt and how they thought about themselves that day, and they described the events that occurred to them that day. Multilevel m...

Conservatives report greater life satisfaction than liberals, but this relationship is relatively weak. To date, the evidence is limited to a narrow set of well-being measures that ask participants for a single assessment of their life in general. We address this shortcoming by examining the relationship between political orientation and well-being...

Objective: Research on searching for meaning in life has focused on trait level relationships rather than within-person relationships. Our goal was to examine within-person relationships between daily states of searching for meaning in life, daily states of presence of meaning in life, and daily states of well-being. Method: To advance our under...

Religion plays an important role in the lives of many people. To understand how religion relates to well-being, it is important to consider the beliefs and practices of the world’s main religions. In the first section, we begin by describing how various religions define well-being and how religions envision God. Next, we outline various beliefs abo...

The present study moved beyond trait reports of rumination, reflection, and meaning in life (presence and search) by examining within-person relationships between daily states of these constructs and well-being. Participants (N = 130) completed reports at the end of the day for 14 days. When analyzed together, daily rumination was negatively relate...

Previous studies have shown that the maximizing orientation, reflecting a motivation to select the best option among a given set of choices, is associated with various negative psychological outcomes. In the present studies, we examined whether these relationships extend to friendship selection and how the number of options for friends moderated th...

Much of the research on relationships between gratitude and well-being has concerned between-person level relationships, and this research suggests that increasing people’s feelings of gratitude can increase their well-being. To complement this research, we examined such relationships at the within-person level. Participants (N = 130) in the presen...

Leisure is a key life domain and a core ingredient for overall well-being. Yet, within positive psychology, its definition and the psychological pathways by which it evokes happiness are elusive (Diener and Biswas-Diener 2008). In this paper, we seek to address these issues by delineating leisure and presenting a conceptual framework linking leisur...