Christopher Oveis’s research while affiliated with California College San Diego and other places

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Publications (52)


Helping You Helps Me: Beneficial Effects of Regulating Others’ Emotions on Well-Being and Physiological Stress
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

December 2024

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23 Reads

Emotion

Olivia Jurkiewicz

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Christopher Oveis

Improving others’ emotions is cognitively and emotionally demanding, potentially increasing stress levels and decreasing well-being. However, the opposite could also occur: Attempts at improving others’ emotions—that is, affect-improving extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation—could enhance regulators’ affective well-being and shield against physiological stress because we theorize that engaging in regulatory action to improve others’ emotions can strengthen relationships, activate self-regulation, and elicit prosocial reward. In two studies, we test the consequences on regulators when they help others regulate their emotions. In Study 1, a 7-day diary study (N = 205, 1,434 observations) of significant social interactions, regulators who reported they improved the emotions of others to a greater extent experienced more emotions, both positive and negative, during their interactions. They also experienced an increase in positive affect from pre- to post-diary, no change in negative affect, and better affective well-being at the end of the study. In Study 2, a within-subject observational laboratory study (N = 94, 47 dyads, 235 observations), we found that during the minutes when regulators displayed greater behaviorally coded attempts at improving targets’ emotions, regulators also experienced a corresponding buffering of increased physiological stress measured by pre-ejection period reactivity. These findings empirically support the role of improving others’ emotions in affective well-being over time and the protection against physiological stress when encountering others’ negative emotions. This work also contributes a theoretical framework for understanding why regulating others’ emotions is important for well-being.

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Helping you helps me: Beneficial effects of regulating others’ emotions on wellbeing and physiological stress

October 2023

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19 Reads

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2 Citations

Improving others’ emotions is cognitively and emotionally demanding, potentially increasing regulators’ stress levels and decreasing regulators’ wellbeing. However, it is also reasonable to expect that the opposite could occur: Engaging in affect-improving extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation (EIER) may enhance regulators’ affective wellbeing and shield against stress because affect-improving EIER can also activate regulators’ emotion regulation and foster better social interactions. In two studies, we test the intrapersonal consequences of engaging in affect-improving EIER. In Study 1, a 7-day diary study (N = 205; 1434 observations) of most significant social interactions, regulators who improved the emotions of others experienced an increase in positive affect from day 1 to day 7 and better wellbeing at the end of the study. In Study 2, a laboratory study (N = 102, 51 dyads), attempts to improve an interaction partner’s emotions were associated with the alleviation of physiological stress measured by pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity. These findings empirically support the role of affect-improving extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation in the self-regulation of emotions and contribute to the theoretical understanding of why social relationships are important for overall health and wellness.


Influencing Others for Your Benefit or Theirs?: How Culture Shapes Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in Everyday Interactions

August 2023

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4 Reads

Culture fundamentally shapes how people interact with others. During these interactions, people often desire to change others’ emotions, and take various actions to do so, but limited research has examined the role culture plays in shaping these actions to influence others’ emotions. Here, building on the literature examining cultural influences on intrapersonal emotion regulation, we theorize that cultural values should affect the strategies people use to regulate others’ emotions through an influence on self- vs. other-serving motives, and present new data in support of this theory. In a 7-day daily diary study (N = 211, 1557 daily reports) examining real episodes of interpersonal emotion regulation, collectivism predicted increased extrinsic reappraisal use, and other-serving motives mediated this relationship. Individualism, contrary to our prediction, did not predict increased extrinsic suppression use. The study, conducted in a natural setting, provides the first evidence linking culture and extrinsic interpersonal emotion regulation, advancing the understanding of how culture shapes motives and actions taken to change others’ emotions.


Amplification of Positivity Treatment for Anxiety and Depression: A Randomized Experimental Therapeutics Trial Targeting Social Reward Sensitivity to Enhance Social Connectedness

August 2023

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32 Reads

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19 Citations

Biological Psychiatry

Background: Social disconnection is common and impairing in anxiety and depressive disorders and does not respond sufficiently to available treatments. The positive valence system supports social bond formation and maintenance yet is often hyporesponsive in those with anxiety or depression. We conducted an experimental therapeutics trial testing the hypothesis that targeting positive valence processes through cognitive and behavioral strategies would enhance responsivity to social rewards, a core mechanism underlying social connectedness. Methods: N=68 adults endorsing clinically elevated anxiety and/or depression with social impairment were randomized 1:1:1 to 5- (n=23) or 10-sessions (n=22) of Amplification of Positivity (AMP) treatment or waitlist (n=23). Pre- to post-treatment change in striatal activity (primary outcome) during social reward anticipation measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging; reactivity to a social affiliation task (secondary); and self-reported social connectedness (exploratory) were examined. Primary analyses compared AMP (doses combined) vs. waitlist. A second aim compared doses. Results: AMP engaged the hypothesized treatment target - leading to greater striatal activation during anticipation of social rewards versus waitlist (d=1.01 [95% CI 0.42, 1.61]; largest striatal volume). AMP yielded larger improvements on positive affect and approach behavior during the affiliation task (but not other outcomes), and social connectedness. Larger striatal and social connectedness increases were observed for 5- vs. 10-session AMP (d range=0.08-1.03). Conclusions: Teaching people with anxiety or depression strategies to increase positive thoughts, behaviors, and emotions enhances activity in brain regions governing social reward processing and promotes social connectedness. Social reward sensitivity may be a transdiagnostic target for remediating social disconnection.


How to Improve Others’ Emotions: Reappraise and be Responsive

April 2023

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152 Reads

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18 Citations

Affective Science

Unlabelled: People often try to improve others' emotions. However, it is unclear which interpersonal emotion regulation strategies are most effective and why. In 121 candid dyadic conversations between undergraduate students via video conferencing, target participants recounted a stressful event to regulator participants. Three strategies used by regulators during these conversations to change targets' emotions were obtained from the regulator after the conversation: extrinsic reappraisal, extrinsic suppression, and extrinsic acceptance. Perceived regulator responsiveness was obtained from targets to examine the social consequences of extrinsic emotion regulation and its mediating role in successful extrinsic emotion regulation. We found that regulators' extrinsic reappraisal use was associated with improved target emotions measured across two distinct classes of outcomes: targets' emotions during the conversation and targets' perception that the regulator improved their emotions. Regulators' extrinsic suppression and acceptance, in contrast, were not related with improved target emotions or perceptions of improvement. Instead, all extrinsic regulatory strategies were associated with improved targets' emotions when mediated by targets' perceptions of regulator responsiveness. Finally, observer-ratings of regulators' extrinsic reappraisal and suppression use were found to be consistent with regulators' self-ratings and follow the same pattern of results on the outcome measures. These findings provide insight into why the social regulation of emotions can succeed or fail and hold implications for interventions aimed at guiding people toward more successfully improving others' emotions. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00183-4.


Everyday co-presence with a romantic partner is associated with lower C-reactive protein

September 2022

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31 Reads

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9 Citations

Brain Behavior and Immunity

Social relationships are an important driver of health, and inflammation has been proposed as a key neurobiological mechanism to explain this effect. Behavioral researchers have focused on social relationship quality to further explain the association, yet recent research indicates that relationship quality may not be as robust a predictor as previously thought. Here, building on animal models of social bonds and recent theory on close relationships, we instead investigated merely being in the physical presence of one’s romantic partner. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that spending more time co-present with a loved partner in everyday life would be associated with lower c-reactive protein (CRP). Three times over the course of one month, 100 people in romantic relationships reported how much time they spent in the same physical space as their partner in the prior 24 hours, in minutes, and provided a sample of blood for CRP assay (n observations = 296). Results from multi-level models showed that when one reported spending more time in the physical presence of their partner they had lower CRP – an effect that was independent from social relationship quality explanations from the prior literature, including romantic relationship quality, hostility, and loneliness. These findings move past global assessments of social isolation to consider a novel everyday behavior that is of great interest in the non-human animal literature – spending time together -- as a potential mechanism linking high-quality relationships and physical health in adult humans. The findings also point to future research on additional behavioral mechanisms that are not dependent on stress pathways: people in high-quality relationships tend to spend enjoyable and affectionate time with one another, which may impact inflammation.


Citations (39)


... The social network is a special kind of complex network that takes people or organizations as nodes and establishes connections and relationships between them [20][21][22]. Different kinds of real complex systems often show consistent statistical properties in their structure that regular and random networks do not have. ...

Reference:

Combined with social network analysis of the art of local folk songs and cultural heritage of national music
Application of an egocentric social network approach to examine changes in social connections following treatment for anxiety and depression: A novel measurement tool for clinical trials research?
  • Citing Article
  • April 2024

Social Science & Medicine

... A notable reduction in physiological stress markers, such as systolic blood pressure and alpha-amylase, was found after providing EER by writing a supportive letter to a friend (Inagaki & Eisenberger, 2016). Jurkiewicz and Oveis (2023) observed an increase in positive affect and overall well-being among support providers who provided emotional support to others during 1 week of a daily diary study. The attempt to improve the recipient's emotional state in the second study resulted in a significant reduction in the preejection period, that is, the interval prior to the onset of the heart's electrical stimulation, as detected by electrocardiogram. ...

Helping you helps me: Beneficial effects of regulating others’ emotions on wellbeing and physiological stress
  • Citing Preprint
  • October 2023

... system during positive than negative feedback in the PRL task, while there was greater activation of the prefrontal reward, salience, and DMN regions during negative vs. positive feedback. In psychotherapy studies, interventions focused on increasing positive emotions have been shown to improve subcortical reward brain functions 50,51 and performance on reward tasks. 55 Our results have important clinical implications. ...

Amplification of Positivity Treatment for Anxiety and Depression: A Randomized Experimental Therapeutics Trial Targeting Social Reward Sensitivity to Enhance Social Connectedness
  • Citing Article
  • August 2023

Biological Psychiatry

... Much of the past research captured how different emotion regulation strategies relate to people's well-being by focusing on one-to-one associations between specific strategies and indicators of individual distress, such as depression, anxiety, and stress (e.g., Aldao et al., 2010;Cameron & Overall, 2018;MacCann et al., 2019;Marroquín et al., 2011;Pauw et al., 2023); and relational well-being, such as relationship satisfaction, relationship quality, or closeness (e.g., Butler, 2017;Cameron & Overall, 2018;MacCann et al., 2019;Pauw et al., 2023;Walker et al., 2023a, b). While the efficacy of a regulatory strategy depends on several factors such as context (e.g., Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2012;Aldao & Tull, 2015), research indicates that intra-and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies characterized by high engagement (e.g., intrapersonal expressive engagement) are generally associated with decreased levels of individual distress and increased levels of relational well-being for both the regulator (actor-effect), and their partner (partner-effect; e.g., Aldao et al., 2010;Jurkiewicz et al., 2023;MacCann et al., 2019;Olderbak et al., 2023;Walker et al., 2023b;Webb et al., 2012). ...

How to Improve Others’ Emotions: Reappraise and be Responsive

Affective Science

... First, researchers have found that spending more time copresent with a romantic partner in everyday life was associated with lower C-reactive protection (CRP), which suggests regulated inflammation [143]. Marital stress also has been associated with immune dysregulation, including increased production of interleukin 6 (IL-6) [141,144,145]. ...

Everyday co-presence with a romantic partner is associated with lower C-reactive protein
  • Citing Article
  • September 2022

Brain Behavior and Immunity

... More specifically, research on gratitude extends our knowledge about the role of discrete positive emotions in psychological health. Research on gratitude practices offers insight into how intentional acts of appreciation may impact cognitive and emotional processes to inform the development of more comprehensive models of positive psychological functioning (Gu et al., 2022). ...

Gratitude Expressions Improve Teammates’ Cardiovascular Stress Responses

Journal of Experimental Psychology General

... Elevated positive affect (PA), a component of the positive valence (approach/appetitive) system, can encourage approach-oriented behaviors that initiate social connections and is related to increased interpersonal connectedness, above and beyond NA (Fredrickson et al., 2008;Fredrickson, 2013;Gable and Berkman, 2008;Gable and Reis, 2010;Kok et al., 2013;Ramsey and Gentzler, 2015;Strong and Aron, 2006;Taylor et al., 2017;Vittengl and Holt, 2000). For example, PA tends to increase in response to social interaction (Hoffman et al., 2021;McIntyre et al., 1991) and is positively related to social connectedness and future social approach motivation (Gable and Berkman, 2008;Hoffman et al., 2021;Taylor et al., 2017;Vittengl and Holt, 2000). ...

Psychometric Evaluation of a Controlled Social Affiliation Paradigm: Findings From Anxiety, Depressive Disorder, and Healthy Samples
  • Citing Article
  • May 2021

Behavior Therapy

... To expand the scope of research, Herchen (2015) then used a broader term unethical prosocial behaviour (hereafter referred to as UPB) to represent this kind of behaviour in the larger society. The second one is on prosocial lies in interpersonal contexts which demonstrates that people sometimes break the rule of honesty to protect others from emotional harm (Levine & Lupoli, 2022;Levine & Schweitzer, 2014;Lupoli et al., 2020). ...

A conflict of values: When perceived compassion decreases trust
  • Citing Article
  • November 2020

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

... Additionally, participants' general sentiments towards Palestinians after the task, when participants knew that their ratings would not be observed by other participants, were also reduced with the increased proportion of treated participants, providing another evidence that compliance was not the only factor driving the results. Nevertheless, future studies should use other nonself-report methods to examine changes in emotion as a result of regulation contagion (see for example 44 ). ...

Emotion Regulation Contagion: Stress Reappraisal Promotes Challenge Responses in Teammates

Journal of Experimental Psychology General

... An expression of gratitude can be delivered via many mediums, including non-verbally, through gift-giving and acts of service, and verbally, through oral exchanges, written notes, and electronic messages. In fact, research has demonstrated the value of each of these forms of gratitude communication in supporting connectedness (Algoe, Haidt, and Gable 2008;Algoe et al., 2020;Kumar and Epley 2018;Park et al. 2021;Walsh et al. 2022). However, despite the value of non-verbal forms of gratitude expression, the Dyadic Process Model highlights the transactional nature of oral and text-based gratitude expressions specifically. ...

A New Perspective on the Social Functions of Emotions: Gratitude and the Witnessing Effect

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology