Baby fever: Situational cues shift the desire to have children via empathic emotions.

The desire to have children is often regarded as a deep, biologically driven desire or a rational decision based on weighing costs and benefits. Based on these assumptions, many people believe that the desire to have children is unchanging. However, the studies presented here indicate that the desire to have children is readily shifted by subtle situational cues, such as advertisements and social media feeds depicting positive images of parents and children. In four studies (N = 1,093), we randomly assigned young adults (ages 18-35) without children to view images of parents and children or control images. We found that positive parent-child images led young adults to a greater desire to have children via increases in empathic emotions both immediately (Studies 1-4) and 3 days later (Study 3), but viewing negative parent-child images did not decrease the desire to have children (Study 2). The results of our studies suggest that portrayals of parents and children may temporarily influence young adults' desires to have children. Given the abundance of parent-child images on social media and intense societal pressure to have children, small changes in the desire to have children may accrue over time to influence child-rearing decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of curiosity-evoking events on activity enjoyment.

Whereas prior literature has studied the positive effects of curiosity-evoking events that are integral to focal activities, we explore whether and how a curiosity-evoking event that is incidental to a focal activity induces negative outcomes for enjoyment. Four experiments and 1 field study demonstrate that curiosity about an event that is incidental to an activity in which individuals are engaged, significantly affects enjoyment of a concurrent activity. The reason why is that curiosity diverts attention away from the concurrent activity and focuses attention on the curiosity-evoking event. Thus, curiosity regarding an incidental event decreases enjoyment of a positive focal activity but increases enjoyment of a negative focal activity.

Perceptual dimensions differentiate emotions.

Individuals often describe objects in their world in terms of perceptual dimensions that span a variety of modalities; the visual (e.g., brightness: dark-bright), the auditory (e.g., loudness: quiet-loud), the gustatory (e.g., taste: sour-sweet), the tactile (e.g., hardness: soft vs. hard) and the kinaesthetic (e.g., speed: slow-fast). We ask whether individuals use perceptual dimensions to differentiate emotions from one another. Participants in two studies (one where respondents reported on abstract emotion concepts and a second where they reported on specific emotion episodes) rated the extent to which features anchoring 29 perceptual dimensions (e.g., temperature, texture and taste) are associated with 8 emotions (anger, fear, sadness, guilt, contentment, gratitude, pride and excitement). Results revealed that in both studies perceptual dimensions differentiate positive from negative emotions and high arousal from low arousal emotions. They also differentiate among emotions that are similar in arousal and valence (e.g., high arousal negative emotions such as anger and fear). Specific features that anchor particular perceptual dimensions (e.g., hot vs. cold) are also differentially associated with emotions.

Hope, pride, and processing during optimal and nonoptimal times of day.

We examine the conditions under which the distinct positive emotions of hope versus pride facilitate more or less fluid cognitive processing. Using individuals' naturally occurring time of day preferences (i.e., morning vs. evening hours), we show that specific positive emotions can differentially influence processing resources. We argue that specific positive emotions are more likely to influence processing and behavior during nonoptimal times of day, when association-based processing is more likely. We show in three experiments that hope, pride, and a neutral state differentially influence fluid processing on cognitive tasks. Incidental hope facilitates fluid processing during nonoptimal times of day (compared with pride and neutral), improving performance on tasks requiring fluid intelligence (Experiment 1) and increasing valuation estimates on tasks requiring that preferences be constructed on the spot (Experiments 2 and 3). We also provide evidence that these differences in preference and valuation occur through a process of increased imagination (Experiment 3). We contribute to emotion theory by showing that different positive emotions have different implications for processing during nonoptimal times of day.