Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

Young Adult Mental Health Beyond the COVID-19 Era: Can Enlightened Policy Promote Long-Term Change?

The status of mental health for adolescents and young adults has aptly been termed a "crisis" across research, clinical, and policy quarters. Arguably, the status quo provision of mental health services for adolescents and young adults is neither acceptable nor salvageable in its current form. Instead, only a wholesale policy transformation of mental health sciences can address crises of this scope. Pandemic-related impacts on mental health, particularly among young adults, have clearly exposed the need for the mental healthcare field to develop a set of transformative priorities to achieve long overdue, systemic changes: (1) frequent mental health tracking, (2) increased access to mental health care, (3) working with and within communities, (4) collaboration across disciplines and stakeholders, (5) prevention-focused emphasis, (6) use of dimensional descriptions over categorical pronouncements, and (7) addressing systemic inequities. The pandemic required changes in mental healthcare that can and should be the beginning of long-needed reform, calling upon all mental health care disciplines to embrace innovation and relinquish outdated traditions.

Leveraging the Strengths of Psychologists With Lived Experience of Psychopathology.

Psychopathology is a common element of the human experience, and psychological scientists are not immune. Recent empirical data demonstrate that a significant proportion of clinical, counseling, and school psychology faculty and graduate students have lived experience, both past and present, of psychopathology. This commentary compliments these findings by leveraging the perspectives of the authors and signatories, who have personal lived experience of psychopathology, to improve professional inclusivity in these fields. By "coming out proud," the authors aim to foster discussion, research, and inclusion efforts as they relate to psychopathology experiences in psychological science. To that end, the authors describe considerations related to disclosure of lived experience, identify barriers to inclusion, and provide concrete recommendations for personal and systemic changes to improve recognition and acceptance of psychopathology lived experience among psychologists.

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = -0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Laughter and short-term blood pressure reactivity in middle-aged and older adult spousal support interactions.

OBJECTIVE: Theories suggest that laughter decreases negative affect and enhances social bonds; however, no studies have examined the benefits of laughter on stress biomarkers in dyads. This study examined the hypotheses that individual and shared laughter would be associated with lower blood pressure reactivity and decreased self-reported and perceived partner distress for the target and spouse in a social support interaction. METHOD: One hundred seventy-three middle-aged and older adult couples from a larger study were video-recorded, and their blood pressure was monitored continuously in the laboratory during a resting baseline, during a social support interaction in which they discussed a target's fear related to aging, and while playing a game (used as a comparison). Both partners self-reported their own and perceived partner distress after the support interaction. Laughter behavior was coded using the Facial Action Coding System criteria. RESULTS: According to Actor Partner Interdependence Models, during the support interaction, the more the target laughed, the lower the spouse's systolic blood pressure was (partner effect). Also, greater laughter was associated with less self-reported and perceived partner distress for targets and spouses (actor effects). There were no other significant associations between individual laughter, shared laughter, systolic or diastolic blood pressure, and distress. Models controlled for gender, marital satisfaction, baseline blood pressure, and the target's baseline distress rating of their fear. CONCLUSIONS: In social support interactions, targets' laughter may have short-term blood pressure benefits for caregiving spouses and distress reducing benefits for both spouses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

No group differences in Traditional Economics Measures of loss aversion and framing effects in bipolar I disorder.

Bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with impaired decision making, yet few studies have adopted paradigms from behavioral economics to decompose which, if any, aspects of decision making may be impacted. This may be particularly relevant for decision-making processes relevant to known difficulties with emotive dysfunction and corresponding reward dysregulation in BD. Participants with bipolar I disorder (BD; n = 44) and non-psychiatric healthy controls (CTL; n = 28) completed three well-validated behavioral economics decision making tasks via a remote-based survey, including loss aversion and framing effects, that examined sensitivity to probabilities and potential gains and losses in monetary and non-monetary domains. Consistent with past work, we found evidence of moderate loss aversion and framing effects across all participants. No group differences were found in any of the measures of loss aversion or framing effects. We report no group differences between bipolar and non-psychiatric groups with respect to loss aversion and framing effects using a remote-based survey approach. These results provide a framework future studies to explore similar tasks in clinical populations and suggest the context and degree to which decision making is altered in BD may be rooted in a more complex cognitive mechanism that warrants future research.

Rethinking resilienceThe End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD George A. Bonanno Basic Books, 2021. 336 pp.

A flexible mindset can help us bounce back after adversity.

Emotional regularity: associations with personality, psychological health, and occupational outcomes.

Emotional regularity is the degree to which a person maintains and returns to a set of emotional states over time. The present investigation examined associations between emotional regularity and extant emotion measures as well as psychologically relevant dimensions of personality, health, and real-world occupational outcomes. Participants included 598 U.S. adults who provided daily experience sampling reports on their emotional states for approximately two months. Results suggest that emotional regularity was related to, but distinct from, well-established measures of emotion including emotional intensity, variability, covariation, inertia, granularity, and emodiversity. Furthermore, emotional regularity significantly predicted measures of personality, psychological health, and occupational outcomes even when accounting for extant emotion measures and sociodemographic covariates. Finally, it explained modest (7.5%) improvement (in terms of cross-validated RSq.) over baseline models containing emotional intensity, variability, and sociodemographic covariates. These findings suggest that emotional regularity may provide an important indicator of healthy emotional functioning and may be a promising area for further scientific discovery.

Assessing Emotion Regulation Ability for Negative and Positive Emotions: Psychometrics of the Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory in United States Adults.

People regulate both negative and positive emotions, and their ability to do this successfully is a cornerstone of adaptive psychological functioning. However, few measures have been available to assess emotion regulation ability across both valence domains. The Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI) was recently developed for this purpose. Here we present the first psychometric study of the PERCI in the United States (N = 508). Confirmatory factor analyses supported the intended eight-factor structure, which was invariant across age, gender, and education. PERCI scores had high internal consistency, and were associated with measures of psychopathology, emotional reactivity, and emotion regulation strategies in expected ways. These observed relationships between the PERCI and various regulation strategies may serve to establish a profile of what strategy patterns characterize differences in emotion regulation ability. Overall, the PERCI had strong psychometrics. Its capacity to assess both valence domains should enable more comprehensive assessments of emotion regulation ability.

A pilot investigation of emotional regulation difficulties and mindfulness-based strategies in manic and remitted bipolar I disorder and major depressive disorder.

BACKGROUND: Both bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder are characterized by difficulties in emotion regulation. Little is known about which specific emotion regulatory patterns may be transdiagnostic versus disorder specific, and how such patterns change as a function of current mood states. METHODS: This preliminary investigation examined specific patterns of self-reported trait emotion regulation difficulties and mindfulness-based regulations strategies across four groups: remitted adults with bipolar I disorder (BD-remitted; n = 32), currently manic adults with bipolar I disorder (BD-manic; n = 19), remitted adults with major depressive disorder (MDD-remitted; n = 32), and healthy controls (CTL; n = 30). RESULTS: All three clinical groups reported significantly greater difficulties with emotion regulation and decreased overall mindfulness-based strategies. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that increased emotion regulation difficulties, decreased mindfulness, and increased emotion-driven impulsivity may be transdiagnostic across mood disorders and states, and that impulsivity may be particularly impaired during periods of mania.

Evaluations of affective stimuli modulated by another person's presence and affiliative touch.

Affiliative touch carries affective meaning and affects the receiver. Although research demonstrates that receiving touch modulates the neural processing of emotions, its effects on evaluations of affective stimuli remain unexplored. The current research examined the effects of affiliative touch on the evaluation of affective images across 3 studies and aimed to disentangle the effect of another person's mere presence from the addition of affiliative touch. Participants thus underwent experimental conditions of social manipulation (presence, alone) and touch manipulations (receiving, self-providing, providing to experimenter) while viewing affective images (negative, neutral, and positive valence) and evaluated their valence. Study 1 included hand-squeezing (N = 39), and Study 2 included forearm-stroking (N = 40) in a within-subjects design. Study 3 included hand-squeezing (N = 109) in a between-subjects design. Across both studies, the results suggested that the receiving condition decreased the negativity of negative images, and the providing condition reduced the positivity of positive images. Furthermore, the other presence condition increased the positivity of positive images compared with the alone condition in Study 1 and to the receiving condition in Study 2. Hand-squeezing and forearm-stroking had differential effects on affective image evaluations depending on the image valence and who provided the touch. Overall, receiving touch seems to attenuate negative evaluations in negative contexts and the presence of others amplifies positive evaluations in positive situations. Discussion highlights the importance of affiliative touch within social interactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Mental health and clinical psychological science in the time of COVID-19: Challenges, opportunities, and a call to action.

COVID-19 presents significant social, economic, and medical challenges. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate huge increases in mental health problems, clinical psychological science must assert a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, COVID-19 is conceptualized as a unique, compounding, multidimensional stressor that will create a vast need for intervention and necessitate new paradigms for mental health service delivery and training. Urgent challenge areas across developmental periods are discussed, followed by a review of psychological symptoms that likely will increase in prevalence and require innovative solutions in both science and practice. Implications for new research directions, clinical approaches, and policy issues are discussed to highlight the opportunities for clinical psychological science to emerge as an updated, contemporary field capable of addressing the burden of mental illness and distress in the wake of COVID-19 and beyond. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Future of Women in Psychological Science.

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.

Associations between hypomania proneness and attentional bias to happy, but not angry or fearful, faces in emerging adults.

Mania, the core feature of bipolar disorder, is associated with heightened and positive emotion responding. Yet, little is known about the underlying cognitive processes that may contribute to heightened positive emotionality observed. Additionally, while previous research has investigated positive emotion biases in non-clinical samples, few if any, account for subthreshold clinical symptoms or traits, which have reliably assessed psychopathological risk. The present study compared continuous scores on a widely used self-report measure of hypomania proneness (HPS-48) with a dot-probe task to investigate attentional biases for happy, angry, fearful, and neutral faces among 66 college student participants. Results suggested that hypomania proneness was positively associated with attentional bias towards happy, but not angry or fearful faces. Results remained robust when controlling for positive affect and did not appear to be affected by negative affect or current symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Findings provide insight into potential behavioural markers that co-occur with heightened positive emotional responding and hypomania in emerging adults.

Understanding and Taking Stock of Positive Emotion Disturbance.

The prevailing view on positive emotions is that they correlate with and confer psychological health benefits for the individual, including improved social, physical and cognitive functioning. Yet an emerging wave of scientific work suggests that positive emotions are also related to a range of suboptimal psychological health outcomes, especially when the intensity, duration, or context do not optimize the individual's goals or meet current environmental demands. This paper provides an overview of the 'other side' of positive emotion, by describing and reviewing evidence supporting the emerging field of Positive Emotion Disturbance (PED). We review relevant emotion processes and key themes of PED and apply this framework to example emotional disorders, and discuss implications for psychological change and future research agendas.

Beliefs about the automaticity of positive mood regulation: examination of the BAMR-Positive Emotion Downregulation Scale in relation to emotion regulation strategies and mood symptoms.

Emotion regulation is a topic of great interest due to its relevance to navigating everyday life, as well as its relevance to psychopathology. Recent research indicates that beliefs about the automaticity of mood regulation are critical to psychological health. In the present study we assessed beliefs about the automaticity of positive mood regulation in relationship to self-reported mood symptoms and explicit emotion regulation strategies. Participants (n = 200) completed an online survey including a scale assessing beliefs about automatic downregulation of positive emotions (i.e. BAMR-PED), beliefs about automatic mood regulation for negative emotions, mood symptoms, and emotion regulation strategies. Results suggested that beliefs about automatic positive emotion regulation were associated with unhelpful emotion regulation strategies and reduced negative affect as well as fewer depressive, manic, and anxiety symptoms. Test-retest of the novel BAMR-PED measure was tested with a further sample (n = 46) and found to be acceptable. Future research should explore how these automatic beliefs have relevance to clinical disorders characterised by positive emotion disturbance, such as bipolar disorder.

Best research practices in clinical science: Reflections on the status quo and charting a path forward.

Clinical psychological science is a rapidly evolving field using a diverse set of methods in various populations. Many of our common research practices and everyday decisions on how and when to use certain methods are described with little detail and formal guidelines and open discussion of those (formal and informal) guidelines is often missing. This special section aims to take stock of current practices in our field and to reflect on them by providing user-friendly articles on common practices across a variety of methodologies in. The articles cover 4 broad areas: (a) diagnostic and clinical assessment including the importance of interrater reliability, the challenges of extreme group designs, and transdiagnostic approaches; (b) clinical neuroscience research including clinical psychophysiology work and translational neuroscience; (c) research conducted outside the laboratory setting including experience sampling and online studies; and (d) daily research practices. A particular focus is on how the discussed practices apply specifically to psychiatric and at-risk clinical populations and the unique methodological challenges that arise when working with these sensitive populations. The contributors to this special issue represent a diverse group whose efforts target a variety of settings and processes with the ultimate goal of increasing transparency surrounding our everyday decisions about designs, methods, and data analysis. We hope that each of the pieces in this section offer inspiration and provide a resource as well as a starting point for further discussion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Best practices in research mentoring in clinical science.

The growth of clinical science as a field depends on the work of engaged mentors nurturing future generations of scientists. Effective research mentoring has been shown to predict positive outcomes, including greater scholarly productivity, reduced attrition, and increased satisfaction with training and/or employment, which ultimately may enhance the quality of the clinical-science research enterprise. Barriers to effective research mentoring, however, pose significant challenges for both mentees and mentors, as well as for labs, training programs, and/or departments. We discuss some key issues as they apply to clinical-science mentoring and note how they are affected across different developmental levels (undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, doctoral, internship, postdoctoral associates, and early career faculty). Although we do not proclaim expertise on these issues-and have struggled with them in our own careers-we believe an open discussion around best mentoring practices will enhance our collective effectiveness and help mentees and our field to flourish. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).