Be here now: Perceptions of uncertainty enhance savoring.

Savoring-an emotion-regulation strategy that involves deliberately upregulating positive affect-has many benefits, but what enhances savoring in the present moment? Drawing from life-history theory, affective and developmental science, and social-psychological frameworks, we examined the idea that perceptions of uncertainty--perceiving the world as random and unpredictable-enhance subsequent savoring. In a large experience-sampling study (Study 1, N = 6,680), we found that individuals who perceived more uncertainty showed increases in subsequent savoring in their daily lives. In a preregistered experiment (Study 2, N = 397), individuals who watched a film that induced uncertainty (vs. order or a control condition) subsequently reported higher savoring intentions. Finally, in a field experiment on a busy urban street (Study 3, N = 201), we found that passersby who received fliers that induced uncertainty (vs. order) subsequently engaged in more savoring behavior by stopping to smell a bouquet of roses. These findings from three studies with diverse samples and methodologies underscore an upside to the specter of uncertainty: it can cause people to savor the positives of the present. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Finding uncommon ground: Extremist online forum engagement predicts integrative complexity.

How do interactions with an ideologically extreme online community affect cognition? In this paper, we examine whether engagement with an online neo-Nazi forum is associated with more one-sided, "black and white" thinking. Using naturalistic language data, we examined differences in integrative complexity, a measure of the degree to which people acknowledge and reconcile conflicting ideas and viewpoints, and contrasted it with Language Style Matching, a measure of group cohesion. In a large web scraping study (N = 1,891), we tested whether two measures of engagement and interaction with the community are associated with less complex, balanced cognition. Using hierarchical regression modeling, we found that both individuals who had been community members for longer and those who had posted more tended to show less complexity in their language, even when accounting for mean differences between individuals. However, these differences in integrative complexity were distinct from group cohesion, which actually decreased with our measures of engagement. Despite small effect sizes, these findings indicate that ideologically extreme online communities may exacerbate the views of their members and contribute to ever-widening polarized cognitions.