Sara B. Algoe's research while affiliated with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and other places

... Fourth, the experimental paradigms employed 3s-long video clips depicting body parts in painful conditions to induce pain empathy, which likely reflected the "primitive " forms of empathic understanding (e.g., mimicry and contagion). Nevertheless, empathy is not only an instantaneous phenomenon, but is considered as an unfolding dynamic process of imaginatively experiencing the subjective consciousness of another person, sensing, understanding, and structuring the world as if one were that person ( Main et al., 2017 ;Murphy et al., 2022 ). Future studies can examine how ongoing first-hand pain affected the dynamic processes of empathy over the course of a social interaction in the real world by utilizing tasks that are more interpersonal in nature ( Goldstein et al., 2018 ). ...

... Although we focused on dispositional gratitude in relationships, Chang et al. (2022) recently showed that situational gratitude (operationalized as daily deviations from one's average level of gratitude) has better predictive power for changes in daily relationship quality compared to dispositional gratitude (average levels of gratitude). This perhaps helps explain the relatively weak effects we found when predicting changes in satisfac tion and commitment; future research may benefit from using datasets with multiple data points to test the role of both partners' situational gratitude. ...

... Future research should explore whether variables predicting sociopolitical control can be improved and whether sociopolitical control contributes to sector-specific improvements as proposed by the model. Previous programmatic work has demonstrated associations between positive emotion and entrepreneurialism (Baluku, Kikooma, & Kibanja, 2016;Eijdenberg & Thompson, 2020), parenting (Don et al., 2021) and HIV viral suppression (Wilson et al., 2017). Positive emotion predicts longevity and, as seen in this study, other psychosocial benefits and sociopolitical control (Diener & Chan, 2011). ...

... It has also been found that a worse response to anti-psychotic treatment is associated with COMT Val158 allele homozygosity in schizophrenia [47]. Thus, treating subjects from the beginning of psychosis, using effective psychological treatment for stress reactivity such as Integrated-Coping Awareness Therapy (I-CAT) [48], could be useful in order to reduce depression and prevent disability. To our knowledge, the relationship between depressive symptoms in psychosis and COMT Val158 homozygosity remains poorly studied. ...

... However, the same analytic approach was not possible for satisfac tion and commitment, each of which were assessed using different scales (without shared items) across samples. Thus, we instead created standardized scores of satisfaction and commitment in each sample (see Jolink et al., 2022;McNulty et al., 2021, or Overall, 2020 for a similar approach). Although this approach arguably comes with an untested assumption that each scale (i.e., three scales for satisfaction and two for commitment) assessed the same underlying construct, we believed this was a reasonable assumption after cross-checking items across scales and given some supporting evidence in our vali dation study (i.e., IMS, PRQC, and CSI items loading onto one factor in a confirmatory factor analysis model). ...

... There were questions about death anxiety and coping strategies among the survivors. In general, pandemics are known to have psychological and social impacts on people and the biological aspects of their lives [34,35]). Death anxiety was a major psychological issue experienced globally during the COVID-19 pandemic [36]. ...

... If positive emotions contribute to better relational outcomes for fathers, it may contribute to paternal relationship maintenance (Ogolsky & Bowers, 2013) and commitment (Le & Agnew, 2003), among numerous other benefits, all of which should have beneficial implications for the mothers. As such, while this research suggests actor positive emotions may not directly contribute to better partner relational outcomes, it is likely that actor positive emotions have an indirect influence on their partner's relational outcomes, via their beneficial influence on actor relational outcomes (e.g., Don et al., 2020). ...

... Indeed, during loving-kindness meditation, participants are instructed to direct warm, kind-hearted thoughts and well-wishes towards a series of other individuals, which theoretically cultivates the individual's innate capacity for compassion and kindness (Salzberg, 2002). As such, it is perhaps not surprising that prior empirical work has demonstrated that loving-kindness meditation beneficially contributes to greater social connectedness (Hutcherson et al., 2008), greater perceptions of social support (Fredrickson et al., 2008), and lower social avoidance motivation (Don et al., 2021a;Don et al., 2021b). While mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation share some similarities (e.g., they are both quiet, contemplative practices with an intentional focus point, such as the breath), one of the critical differences between the two is that mindfulness involves open and receptive attention towards all experiences occurring in the present moment, whereas loving-kindness meditation involves overtly cultivating compassion and goodwill, even if that was not the individual's natural experience in the present moment. ...

... Stress and coping research is shifting from focusing exclusively on the negative effects of chronic conditions (CCs) to an emphasis on ways in which these conditions promote positive life changes [1]. Benefit finding (BF), defined as individual differences in perceiving positive life changes resulting from adversity and negative life stressors [1,2], herein emerged as a key construct and gained increasing attention in the context of CCs [3]. Positive life changes may manifest themselves in domains including intrapersonal benefits (e.g., feeling stronger and wiser), interpersonal benefits (e.g., feeling closer with friends and family), and changes in priorities and goals (e.g., reordering goals and emphasis of enjoyment in life) [4]. ...

... For instance, gratitude has been found to improve protective factors for high-risk behaviors in African American youth [17]. Additionally, in a sample of Asian American youth, researchers found that gratitude was a facilitator of overall well-being [26]. Gratitude was also found to promote positive mental health outcomes in a sample of Latin American youth [27]. ...