Building on prominent theories of emotional aging (Carstensen, 2006; Charles & Luong, 2013), this study investigated age differences in the variability and situational sensitivity of emotion regulation strategies. We hypothesized that, older, as compared to younger, adults would demonstrate greater temporal variability in their use of emotion regulation strategies and adapt them more flexibly to the perceived controllability of daily stressors. Over 28 days, younger adults ( = 133, = 24.95 years, = 2.79, 49% female) and older adults ( = 119, = 69.50 years, = 3.50, 61% female) reported their use of cognitive reappraisal and situation modification strategies in relation to their most stressful situation each day. They also rated the perceived controllability of these situations. Analyses revealed multidirectional age differences in the variability of strategy use: Older adults showed greater temporal variability in situation modification but less variability in cognitive reappraisal, compared to younger adults. Additionally, there were significant age differences in how situation modification strategies were adapted to the perceived controllability of stressors. The within-person correlation between stressor controllability and situation modification use was stronger in older adults than in younger adults. In contrast, no such age differences were found for cognitive reappraisal strategies. These effects remained robust even after controlling for various person- and stressor-related characteristics. Overall, our results suggest that age differences in the ability to flexibly adjust emotion regulation strategies to specific situations might depend on the strategy used. Further research should examine additional situational characteristics and emotion regulation strategies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Children use interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) with parents and friends to manage their emotions, which impacts their psychological adjustment. However, the distinct patterns of IER with parents and friends and their effects on children's psychological adjustment are not well understood. The present study employs latent profile analysis to identify unique patterns of intrinsic IER with parents and friends among a cohort of Chinese children ( = 1,678, = 10.42 years; = 1.2 years; 50.9% boys) and explores the associations of those subgroups with children's psychological adjustment (including depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, general self-worth, and life satisfaction). The findings revealed six distinct intrinsic IER profiles: extremely low IER (2.5%), low IER (16.2%), average IER (40.2%), high parent-low friend IER (4.2%), low parent-high friend IER (3.9%), and high IER (33.0%). Children in higher grades and girls were more likely to belong to the low parent-high friend IER profile compared to their counterparts. Children in high IER with both parents and friends reported the best psychological adjustment. In contrast, children categorized in the extremely low IER, low IER, and low parent-high friend IER profiles displayed poorer psychological adjustment relative to average IER and high IER profiles. These findings highlight the importance of examining the diversity of intrinsic IER patterns with parents and friends to gain a comprehensive understanding of children's psychological adjustment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Attachment security has the potential to be a protective factor against intrusive symptoms. However, its impact on intrusive symptoms across different types of trauma is not well understood. To address this, we explored how priming interpersonal and place attachment security affects intrusive symptoms in the context of man-made and natural traumatic events. One hundred sixty-five adult participants were randomly assigned to interpersonal or place attachment security priming or a control condition and subsequently watched man-made war or natural disaster films in a lab setting. For the following 7 days, they completed an intrusion diary each day. The results showed that although neither type of attachment security priming immediately alleviated distress following traumatic stimuli, both exerted mitigating effects during the subsequent week: Interpersonal attachment security reduced daily intrusion counts, and place attachment security decreased both intrusion counts and vividness. However, the interaction between man-made trauma and place attachment security priming was associated with worsened daily intrusion-related distress. Under natural disaster conditions, postpriming state attachment security and posttrauma reappraisal mediated the effects of attachment priming on intrusive and traumatic symptoms. This study reveals the varying effects of interpersonal or place attachment priming on intrusive memories in man-made war and natural disaster, demonstrating the impact of attachment security priming in the immediate and short term after viewing trauma films. These findings offer the potential for developing attachment-based interventions tailored to specific trauma types. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Reports an error in "Perceptual sensitivity to labeling stereotyped emotion expressions: Associations with age and subclinical psychopathology symptoms from childhood through early adulthood" by David G. Weissman, Henna I. Vartiainen, Erik C. Nook, Hilary K. Lambert, Stephanie F. Sasse, Leah H. Somerville and Katie A. McLaughlin (, 2025[Apr], Vol 25[3], 588-600; see record 2025-33402-001). In the article, acknowledgment of funding from the National Institute of General Medical Science to David G. Weissman was missing from the author note. The funding paragraph should have read, "This research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (R37-MH119194 to Katie A. McLaughlin and K99-MH127248 to David G. Weissman), the National Institute of General Medical Science (R16GM154604 to David G. Weissman), an Early Career Research Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (Katie A. McLaughlin), a One Mind Institute Rising Star Award (Katie A. McLaughlin), and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE1144152 to Erik C. Nook)." The findings and conclusions of the article remain unchanged. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2025-33402-001). This study investigates (a) age-related differences in how the intensity of stereotyped facial expressions influence the emotion label children, adolescents, and adults assign to that face and (b) how this perceptual sensitivity relates to subclinical symptoms of psychopathology. In 2015-2016, 184 participants aged 4-25 years viewed posed stereotypes of angry, fearful, sad, and happy expressions morphed with neutral expressions at 10%-90% intensity. Thin plate regression smoothing splines were used to chart nonlinear associations between age and the perceptual threshold participants needed to assign the emotion label expected based on cultural consensus. Results suggest that sensitivity to labeling stereotypical happy faces as "happy" peaked by age 4. Sensitivity to perceiving stereotypical angry faces as "angry" increased from ages 4 to 7 and then plateaued. In contrast, sensitivity to perceiving stereotypical fearful and sad faces demonstrated protracted development, not reaching a plateau until ages 15 and 16, respectively. Reduction in selecting the "I don't know" response was the primary driver of these age-related changes. Stereotyped fear expressions required the highest intensity to be labeled as such and showed the most marked change in perceptual threshold across development. Interestingly, lower intensity morphs of stereotypical fear faces were frequently labeled "sad." Furthermore, perceiving lower intensity fear morphs was associated with fewer internalizing and externalizing symptoms in participants aged 7-19. This study describes the development of perceptual sensitivity to labeling stereotypical expressions of emotion according to cultural consensus and shows that how people perceive and categorize ambiguous facial expressions is associated with vulnerability to psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People often physically cling to others when afraid and doing so can downregulate negative emotional experiences (e.g., Coan et al., 2006). However, in some situations, physical touch may fail to downregulate emotional experiences-such as when an individual being touched is physiologically aroused themselves. To test this hypothesis, we built plush robots with motorized plastic ribcages that were manipulated to contract and expand to simulate human breathing patterns. Participants held these robots while we measured their heart rate before, during, and after watching a fear-eliciting stimulus. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants who interacted with robots that exhibited accelerated-breathing patterns experienced a pronounced increase in their own heart rate, compared to participants who held stable-breathing and nonbreathing robots. These results indicate that holding or clinging to others engaged in accelerated breathing may be ineffective or detrimental for downregulating one's own physiological arousal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

There is growing interest in examining loneliness using intensive repeated assessment methods in daily life; however, much remains unknown regarding variation in loneliness at the within- and between-person level. Better characterizing dynamic daily experiences of loneliness will help clarify the nature of loneliness experiences that may be indicative of current and future risk for chronic loneliness and provide information to inform future study designs. We characterized daily loneliness among an online sample of 98 adults (23-78 years, 55% women, generally healthy) who completed daily surveys for 14 consecutive days ( = 1,330). Participants were systematically recruited in 2024 based on loneliness status categories (41 chronically lonely, 27 acutely lonely, and 30 nonlonely) derived from Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System measure scores and self-reported duration. We compared the following for each group: (a) average levels of daily loneliness, (b) the proportion of within- versus between-person variance in daily loneliness, and (c) indicators of within- and between-person daily loneliness variability. Analyses revealed that lonely individuals overall (both chronic and acute) reported higher levels of average daily loneliness than nonlonely individuals. Furthermore, despite self-reporting similar levels of traitlike loneliness (Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System measure) and average daily loneliness as acutely lonely individuals, chronically lonely individuals had a higher proportion of within-person variance and greater within-person variability in daily loneliness. Findings offer a starting point to disentangle how within-person variability of loneliness in daily life may play a role in the development and maintenance of chronic loneliness over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Research suggests that disgust may be more resistant to extinction than fear, with implications for anxiety disorder treatment. Theory suggests that disgust and fear are driven by distinct cognitive learning mechanisms, yet limited research has directly compared them experimentally as most prior work has examined either fear or disgust in isolation, often using different types of unconditioned stimuli (US). In the present online investigation (collected spring 2025), = 332 participants (i.e., majority White and female undergraduates) were randomly assigned to one of four differential conditioning paradigms, each defined by the emotion and sensory modality of the US: (a) disgust-auditory (DA), (b) fear-auditory (FA), (c) disgust-images, or (d) fear-images. Participants rated the conditioned stimuli (CSs) using a standard US expectancy scale to assess expectancy learning and using discrete emotion ratings (fear and disgust) and valence ratings (pleasantness) to assess evaluative learning. During acquisition, the DA condition showed the strongest learning when measured via discrete emotion ratings, while the FA condition showed the strongest and fastest expectancy learning. DA was also the most resistant to extinction across both evaluative measures. No group differences emerged for reinstatement based on evaluative indices; however, FA produced the strongest reinstatement in US expectancy, while DA showed the weakest. Overall, results support the idea of differences in learning mechanism, suggesting that disgust learning is driven primarily by evaluative cognition, whereas fear learning is driven by expectancy cognition. Disgust's relative resistance to extinction may be a mechanism explaining poorer treatment outcomes for disorders characterized by heightened disgust. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Violence exposure has deleterious effects on emotional well-being, including higher rates of future mental illness. Adolescence is an important period of neural development within brain regions (e.g., prefrontal cortex) that support emotional processes. The relationship between brain activity and emotion may vary with violence exposure. Thus, this study investigated the relationship between violence exposure, stress-elicited brain activity, and emotion in young people. Violence exposure was measured four times from 11 to 19 years of age. Participants ( = 301) returned 1 year later (age = 20) to complete mental health (i.e., anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress) questionnaires and the Montreal Imaging Stress Task during behavioral (e.g., skin conductance response and cortisol) and neuroimaging data collection. Data were collected from 2004 to 2018. Violence exposure was positively associated with mental health symptoms. Further, violence exposure moderated the relationship between stress-elicited dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity and depression, cortisol, and skin conductance response. These findings suggest that violence exposure moderates the relationship between stress-elicited brain function and emotion-related behavior in young people. These findings provide novel insight into neural processes that may underlie the relationship between prior violence exposure and emotional function, which may have important implications for mental health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Converging evidence suggests that visual spatial attention is preferentially allocated to emotional over neutral stimuli, referred to as an attentional bias to emotional information. Intriguing questions emerged about whether this attentional bias is facilitated by an assumed right hemispheric dominance of emotion processing and by converging cross-modal information (Gerdes et al., 2021). However, we argue that a critical condition that would allow an interpretation in terms of an influence on an emotional attention bias is missing from the experimental design testing these effects: namely, a condition presenting only neutral pictures. To corroborate our argument, we conducted a replication and extension of the eye-tracking study by Gerdes et al. (2021), including this control condition. Specifically, we presented pairs of pictures and lateralized sounds in a free-viewing paradigm and tested the effect of picture position, sound position, and sound valence on an attentional bias score (BS), a difference value for the number of first fixations to unpleasant pictures compared to neutral ones. Importantly, we included a neutral-neutral condition and computed a corresponding BS for an arbitrary set of neutral pictures. Both the supposed leftward bias of emotional attention (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if they are presented on the left) and its supposed guidance by sounds (i.e., the BS for unpleasant pictures is more pronounced if a sound was heard on the same side as the unpleasant picture) emerged in striking parallelism for both unpleasant-neutral and neutral-neutral picture pairs. Thus, the paradigm gives no evidence for emotion specificity of results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Reappraisal is a common emotion regulation strategy that involves adjusting how a situation is appraised. While much is known about its use to reduce negative affect in negative situations, less is known about its use across negative, neutral, and positive contexts to increase positive affect (i.e., positive goal reappraisal). To fill this gap, we investigated the efficacy and mechanisms of positive goal reappraisal across three valence categories in two complementary studies. In Study 1, 158 participants rated their subjective affect and reported how they appraised depicted situations on key appraisal dimensions with and without using reappraisal. In Study 2, 70 participants completed the same task, while their electromyographic and electroencephalographic responses were recorded. We found that reappraisal was effective across all valence categories, as it increased subjective positive affect and decreased subjective negative affect in response to negative, neutral, and positive pictures. Reappraisal also increased reactivity for neutral and positive pictures and decreased reactivity for negative and neutral pictures. Regarding cognitive mechanisms, we found that the effects of reappraisal were related to appraisal shifts, particularly changes in congruence and relevance. A broader range of appraisal shifts were involved in neutral and positive contexts than in negative ones, suggesting that reappraisal mechanisms may be context-dependent. Finally, reappraisal amplified the late positive potential across all picture types within a relatively early time window (263-1,013 ms), indicating sustained attentional engagement. We conclude that positive goal reappraisal may be effective irrespective of stimulus valence by producing appraisal shifts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Expressive suppression is often considered a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy given its negative effects on psychological and physiological outcomes. However, expressive suppression may help fulfill impression management goals, offsetting some intrapersonal costs. The present research considers this question by examining impressions of others who suppress versus express anger across a large range of situations. Across seven studies conducted between the spring of 2023 and the spring of 2024, participants ( = 2,613; 47.88% women; 67.39% White; 10.07% Black; 8.30% Asian; 7.77% bi/multiracial; 5.32% Hispanic/Latine; 0.77% other; 0.34% Native American or American Indian) read vignettes about people responding angrily or suppressing anger in response to public confrontations. Overall, results revealed that targets who suppressed (vs. expressed) anger were perceived as warmer and more competent. Further, mediation analyses demonstrated that participants were more likely to ascribe more sophisticated minds to targets who suppressed (vs. expressed) anger, which was, in turn, related to warmth and competence perceptions (Study 3). Taken together, participants had more positive regard for anger suppressors than anger expressors, and these effects were generally not qualified by context or by target race or gender. These results suggest that apparently personally maladaptive suppression strategies might trade off against the interpersonal benefits of suppressing situationally inappropriate emotions such as anger. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated how emotional events-specifically experiences of sadness (vs. happiness)-influence individuals' mental visualization processes, with a focus on how they alter perceived color chroma in visual imagery. Drawing on emotion regulation theory, we propose that people are more motivated to forget sad experiences than happy ones, and this tendency influences how such events are mentally visualized. Specifically, individuals tend to mentally represent sad events with lower color chroma (i.e., reduced vividness, intensity, or saturation) compared to happy events. Results from three experiments involving 939 participants support our theorization (data collected in 2018-2023). Experiment 1 extends prior research by showing that participants mentally represent sad experiences in lower color chroma than happy experiences. This suggests that the color-emotion association exists not only in stimuli-based processing but also in mental visualization. Experiment 2 identifies the mediating role of the motivation to forget the emotional experience in the causal relationship between emotions and color chroma representation. Experiment 3 further indicates that the effect of emotions on color chroma is mitigated when individuals are explicitly prompted to forget emotional experiences. This research demonstrates the role of motivational processes in shaping mental visualization and provides a novel and verifiable explanation for the association between color chroma and emotions documented in the emotion literature (Pazda et al., 2024). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

How we detect and perceive threats and other emotional objects has long been a central theme in affective science research. Recent studies have emphasized that top-down, emotion-guided attention impacts perceptual decision making of emotional stimuli. While the influential low road hypothesis proposes spatial frequency (SF) being an important factor in threat detection, a crucial outstanding question is how emotional information-carried in different SF signals-is processed in perceptual decision making under emotion-guided attention. Over a series of five experiments, we measured participants' ( = 219) emotion-related decision making, examining the interaction of top-down (attention) and bottom-up (emotion expression, and SF) factors. Results showed there was significantly better performance in detecting high (H)SF compared to low (L)SF fearful targets under emotion-guided attention; this pattern also emerged for happy target detection. However, in a gender-identification task, better performance for HSF fearful stimuli was not observed. Drift diffusion modeling revealed that emotion-guided attention enhanced the evidence accumulation for HSF compared to LSF information. These results support the notion that while the fast low road may be responsible for allowing threat to capture our attention in a bottom-up manner, detailed information beyond the low road may be more efficient in driving top-down-guided identification of the threatening or emotional object. Findings from this series of experiments indicate the potentially context-dependent functions of bottom-up and top-down factors in threat detection and perception as well as emotion perception in general. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recreational fear experiences, such as haunted attractions, paradoxically attract millions of patrons annually; despite fear being a generally negative emotion, people will pay money to experience it. Some have stipulated that part of the appeal is interpersonal-anecdotally, such experiences appear to bring people closer together. We put this idea to the test in five studies conducted at three commercial haunted attractions. In Studies 1-4, feeling more fear and making physical contact with other attraction guests were strong predictors of perceiving that the experience brought participants closer together. However, we consistently observed tiny or null results when measuring pre-to-post changes in participants' interpersonal closeness ratings (Studies 2 and 4), highlighting the nuanced nature of these relational dynamics. To further investigate these complexities, we employed a final qualitative interview study (Study 5), which found that postexperience processing (time to talk about the experience before quantifying one's feelings) may be critical to bonding. These findings suggest that while fear reliably fosters a subjective sense of connection, its relational impact may depend on how the experience is processed and contextualized. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The long-term mental and physical health impacts attributed to loneliness may result from its longitudinal association with stress. Yet, the directionality of this association remains unclear. The present study examined the bidirectional association between loneliness and perceived stress across four monthly time points. Participants ( = 1,921, = 48.59, 84% women) completed measures of loneliness and perceived stress between June and September 2021. Data were analyzed using a random intercept cross-lagged panel model, which separately estimated between- and within-person effects over time. Supporting hypotheses, increases in loneliness and perceived stress, relative to expected scores, were each prospectively associated with respective increases in perceived stress and loneliness at the within-person level. In other words, loneliness and perceived stress were reciprocally related over time, even when accounting for their strong, traitlike association. Findings have key implications for methodological approaches to the study of loneliness and stress and inform mechanistic understandings of this association. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Emerging evidence suggests inflammation may enhance social approach toward close others. Yet, little is known about how inflammation relates to positive affective experiences with different social targets. To address this, we examined associations between inflammation and perceptions of anticipated and experienced shared, kind-hearted positive affect (i.e., perceived positivity resonance) with close versus non-close others. Participants ( = 55; 67% female; 43% White; = 20.06) provided blood samples on two consecutive days, once before and once after receiving the annual influenza vaccine, which were assayed for levels of the inflammatory marker interleukin-6. They also completed an in-lab writing task about anticipated positivity resonance in social interactions and completed eight momentary assessments of experienced positivity resonance. A divergence emerged between anticipated and experienced positivity resonance, specifically with non-close others: Higher interleukin-6 levels were associated with greater , but lower , positivity resonance during interactions with non-close others. However, these effects did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and are considered preliminary. Additionally, higher levels of interleukin-6 were related to significantly greater ease imagining interacting with a close other, and a larger quantity of interactions with different close others. These findings provide preliminary evidence that associations between inflammation and positive emotions during social interactions vary as a function of anticipated versus experienced interactions, and as a function of target (close vs. non-close others). Future work is needed to test whether results replicate and generalize to older adults and those with chronically elevated inflammation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural processes of emotional reactivity are putative mechanisms of risk for psychopathology in children and adults. Individual differences in neural processes of emotion in adults are linked to poor adult mental health and to developing emotion in offspring. At the level of observed and self-reported behavior, both state and trait-level variations in emotional reactivity are associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, whether state and trait-level variations are visible at the level of neural activity remains unknown. Pregnancy is a time of heightened state-level variability in maternal emotion and a sensitive period of risk for psychopathology in mothers and infants. As such, pregnancy may be a particularly useful period for understanding independent links between state and trait-level processing and mother and infant outcomes. Using a longitudinal design, we measured the late positive potential (LPP), a neural marker of emotional reactivity, and symptoms of anxiety and depression in 92 ( = 30.49) women between 2015 and 2017 during laboratory visits in the second trimester of pregnancy and at 4-month postpartum. Infant temperamental negativity was observed at 4-month postpartum. Lower trait-level LPP predicted greater maternal depressive symptoms, while higher state-level LPP predicted both maternal anxiety and depressive symptoms. Neither trait nor state-level LPP predicted infant negative emotional reactivity. Findings suggest that trait and state level of maternal emotion reactivity may be differentially related to specific maternal health outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The stereotype that women are more emotional than men is pervasive in Western culture, but little research has directly examined how this stereotype translates into judgments of emotionality. We propose that one way gender stereotypes shape judgments of emotionality is through the aggregation of emotional expressions, in which perceivers preferentially remember stereotype-congruent emotional stimuli and consequently overweight these stimuli when forming judgments. To test this, we conducted five studies ( = 772) during 2021-2025 among men participants. In Study 1, we validated the persistence of gender-emotion stereotypes. For Studies 2-5, we selected emotional expression stimuli that elicited no gender difference in ratings of emotionality at the single face level. Men participants saw sequences of male and female faces displaying emotional expressions ranging from neutral-to-angry (Study 2), neutral-to-happy (Study 3), and neutral-to-sad (Study 4) and were asked to indicate whether they considered the person in the sequence to be emotional or not. When men perceivers aggregated these stimuli (which exhibited no gender difference at the single face level), they were more likely to rate sequences of female faces as emotional. Furthermore, using a memory test we show that participants better remembered angry female faces within a sequence compared with angry male faces (Study 5), supporting the idea that aggregation of emotional information enables stereotypes to influence judgments via memory. This study reveals an important mechanism by which stereotypes are translated into emotionality judgments. We used only White stimuli faces and recruited only men participants, limiting generalizability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

There is an age-related positivity effect in attention to emotional faces. However, all of these studies have relied on computer tasks where people are directed to look at faces on a screen. The primary aim of this study was to test whether the age-related positivity effect to emotional faces emerges under more naturalistic settings. The secondary aim was to test whether an own-age bias exists in attention to emotional faces and whether task ecological validity moderates any observed effect. Younger and older adults completed a naturalistic positivity effect task where they sat in a waiting room with emotional faces on the walls while their eye-gaze behavior was monitored with a mobile eye-tracker. They also completed a computer-based task that involved viewing pairs of emotional faces on a screen while wearing a mobile eye-tracker. As predicted, a positivity effect emerged in the computer-based task where older adults looked less at negative faces compared to younger adults, but no age-related positivity bias emerged in the naturalistic task. In addition, younger adults showed an own-age bias in attention to faces, and this was strongest in the naturalistic task. There was no evidence of an own-age bias in older adults for either task. These findings highlight the importance of considering ecological validity in studies of attention and emotional aging. Implications and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique context to explore prosociality during times of distress. Indicative of social proficiency and adaptive functioning, prosociality refers to dispositions to allocate one's attention and energy to the needs of others. Emotion regulation strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, may have affected how individuals responded to their distress during the pandemic through varying forms of prosociality. In two samples, we examined how pandemic distress was associated with altruistic (i.e., goals of increasing another's welfare) and egoistic (i.e., goals of increasing one's welfare) prosociality, and whether emotion regulation strategies moderated these associations. Study 1 included 326 adults ( = 38.66 years, = 14.29; 72.91% White) who responded to an online survey in the first month of the pandemic and showed that pandemic distress was positively associated with egoistic prosociality, and cognitive reappraisal was positively associated with both egoistic and altruistic prosociality. Study 2 included 1,489 undergraduate students ( = 19.92 years, = 2.28; 53.6% Asian, 33.7% White, 2.0% Native/Indigenous American, 1.8% Black, 5.7% multiracial) who completed the same measures 5-12 months after the start of the pandemic. In addition to direct associations of both pandemic distress and regulation with prosociality, moderation analyses demonstrated that individuals who used more cognitive reappraisal were more likely to engage in egoistic prosociality when experiencing greater pandemic distress. These results demonstrate that pandemic distress is associated with certain forms of prosociality, depending on which emotion regulation strategies are employed during these times of distress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In a pattern known as the , older adults tend to prioritize positive over negative information in attention and memory compared to younger adults. Traditional theories attribute this effect to age-related shifts toward positive emotions, and it is typically operationalized as a two-by-two interaction between age (younger vs. older) and valence (negative vs. positive). Alternative accounts, however, suggest that discrete emotions within valence categories may differentially drive the effect. To test this, from June to July 2023, younger adults ( = 101) and older adults ( = 108) completed an emotion-induced blindness task online. In each task trial, an emotional distractor image appeared shortly before a task-relevant target in a rapid stream of images. Emotional distractors depicted scenes of fear, disgust, excitement, contentment, or were emotionally neutral. We measured distraction from the emotional images and found minimal age-related differences between trials with different discrete emotion categories, but the positivity effect was evident when we compared across negative and positive valence categories. These findings suggest that valence, rather than discrete emotions, drives the positivity effect in attention. We discuss insights gained, limitations of our approach, and generalizability of our results to understand age-related changes in emotional prioritization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).