Jieni Zhou

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Psychology

Background: Young adults (ages 18-39 years) with cancer face unique risks for negative psychosocial outcomes. These risks could be lessened with positive psychology interventions adapted for social media if intervention messages encourage intentions to do the activities and positive message reactions and if young adults with cancer perceive few do...

We propose that the emotional quality of people’s interactions with acquaintances (i.e., weak ties) and strangers contributes to well-being. We test whether a new micro-intervention can raise the quality of these interactions. We randomized young adults (N = 335) to this connectedness micro-intervention or a control intervention. Both interventions...

Positivity resonance, defined as a co-experienced kind-hearted positive emotion, is commonly observed to strengthen relationships in the United States. However, it is unclear whether levels of positivity resonance differ across cultures. Prior research suggests that in cultures that are perceived as offering more freedom and choice in social ties (...

This paper reports on a pre-registered experiment designed to test whether artificial agents can help people to create more moments of high-quality connection with other humans. Of four pre-registered hypotheses, we found (partial) support for only one.

Although often experienced individually, emotions are at times co-experienced with others, collectively. One type of collective emotion, termed positivity resonance, refers to coexperienced positive affect accompanied by caring non-verbal behavioral synchrony and biological synchrony across persons. Growing evidence illustrates the contributions of...

Objectives People raised in low-socioeconomic status (SES) households are at an increased risk for physical illness in adulthood. A shift in gene expression profiles in the immune system is one biological mechanism thought to account for elevated disease susceptibility, with a frequently investigated profile being the conserved transcriptional resp...

The positivity resonance theory of coexperienced positive affect (Fredrickson, 2016) identifies the emotion of love as a collective state. This state, termed positive resonance, is defined by the presence of three key features: shared positive affect, caring nonverbal synchrony, and biological synchrony. The current study examined whether a modest...

Although behaviors such as handwashing, mask wearing, and social distancing are known to limit viral spread, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals in the United States did not adopt them. The positivity resonance theory of co-experienced positive affect (Fredrickson, 2016) holds that shared pleasant states that include the key features o...

Shared positive emotions involving caring and synchrony—termed “positivity resonance”—are associated with mental health (Major et al., 2018). We hypothesized that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, individual differences in trait resilience would be linked with better overall mental health in part because those higher in trait resilience experience mor...

Although simple behaviors such as handwashing, mask wearing and social distancing are known to limit viral spread, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals in the United States did not adopt them. The Positivity Resonance Theory of collective positive affect holds that shared pleasant states that include the key features of mutual care and...

Shared positive emotions involving caring and synchrony—termed “positivity resonance”—are associated with mental health (Major et al., 2018). We hypothesized that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, individual differences in trait resilience would be linked with better overall mental health in part because those higher in trait resilience experience mor...