Emotional experiences and psychological well-being in 51 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents challenges to psychological well-being, but how can we predict when people suffer or cope during sustained stress? Here, we test the prediction that specific types of momentary emotional experiences are differently linked to psychological well-being during the pandemic. Study 1 used survey data collected from 24,221 participants in 51 countries during the COVID-19 outbreak. We show that, across countries, well-being is linked to individuals' recent emotional experiences, including calm, hope, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness. Consistent results are found in two age, sex, and ethnicity-representative samples in the United Kingdom (n = 971) and the United States (n = 961) with preregistered analyses (Study 2). A prospective 30-day daily diary study conducted in the United Kingdom (n = 110) confirms the key role of these five emotions and demonstrates that emotional experiences precede changes in well-being (Study 3). Our findings highlight differential relationships between specific types of momentary emotional experiences and well-being and point to the cultivation of calm and hope as candidate routes for well-being interventions during periods of sustained stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Superior Communication of Positive Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalisations Compared to Speech Prosody.

The human voice communicates emotion through two different types of vocalizations: nonverbal vocalizations (brief non-linguistic sounds like laughs) and speech prosody (tone of voice). Research examining recognizability of emotions from the voice has mostly focused on either nonverbal vocalizations or speech prosody, and included few categories of positive emotions. In two preregistered experiments, we compare human listeners' (total n = 400) recognition performance for 22 positive emotions from nonverbal vocalizations (n = 880) to that from speech prosody (n = 880). The results show that listeners were more accurate in recognizing most positive emotions from nonverbal vocalizations compared to prosodic expressions. Furthermore, acoustic classification experiments with machine learning models demonstrated that positive emotions are expressed with more distinctive acoustic patterns for nonverbal vocalizations as compared to speech prosody. Overall, the results suggest that vocal expressions of positive emotions are communicated more successfully when expressed as nonverbal vocalizations compared to speech prosody. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10919-021-00375-1.