Happiness-To enjoy now or later? Consequences of delaying happiness and living in the moment beliefs.

How do people think about happiness? Is it something best enjoyed as an investment over time, or is it something fleeting that should be savored? When people view happiness as an investment, they may endorse delaying happiness (DH)-the belief that working hard and sacrificing opportunities for happiness now will contribute to greater future happiness. When people view happiness as fleeting, they may endorse living in the moment (LM)-the belief that one should seize proximal opportunities to experience happiness now, rather than later. Using a mix of cross-sectional, meta-analytic (Studies 1, 2a, 2b, 2c), experimental (Study 3), and daily diary methods (Study 4), people who endorsed DH or LM beliefs anticipated more positive affect upon goal attainment and experienced greater well-being, but only DH was related to more negative affect when pursuing nonfocal goals and less delay discounting of future rewards. Implications for self-regulation and emotion are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Using imaginary worlds for real social benefits.

We argue that imaginary worlds gain much of their appeal because they fulfill the fundamental need of human beings to feel connected to other humans. Immersion into story worlds provides a sense of social connection to the characters and groups represented in the world. By fulfilling the need to belong, imaginary worlds provide a buffer against rejection and loneliness.

Social comparison, parasocial relationships, and attachment style: how and when do celebrities improve self-liking?

The recent exponential increase in information available online has not only increased access to information about celebrities, but also decreased the degree to which that information is unambiguously positive. In the current work, we examined how positive celebrities (i.e. celebrities who are primarily admired) versus more ambiguous celebrities (i.e. celebrities about whom people have mixed feelings) differentially affect feelings about the self. Across three studies, we found that high attachment anxiety was associated with assimilating positive celebrities to feel better about the self, whereas attachment avoidance was associated with contrasting ambivalent celebrities to feel better to feel better about the self. Implications for parasocial relationships, social comparison, and attachment are discussed.

If music be the food of love, play on: Four ways that music may lead to social connection.

The hypothesis that music is well suited to facilitate social bonding (Savage et al., target article) is highly consistent with social psychological research on the need to belong. We explore how music is uniquely placed to increase feelings of connections to large collectives by increasing collective effervescence, providing narratives, reminding one of others, and providing social surrogates.

Restorative Narratives for Health Promotion.

Stories may provide a useful way of communicating about health and promoting engagement for health promotion campaigns. In this study, we examined the effectiveness of a particular type of narrative, restorative narratives (stories that highlight hope and resilience), relative to negative narratives (stories that focus on suffering or challenges). We also tested the effect of labeling the story as fact or fiction. The results suggested that restorative narratives may foster greater prosocial behavior than negative narratives and effectiveness does not differ depending on whether a story is labeled as "factual" or "fictional." Our findings offer encouraging implications for future promotional efforts by health organizations.