Feeling Appreciated Buffers Against the Negative Effects of Unequal Division of Household Labor on Relationship Satisfaction.

Decades of research from across the globe highlight unequal and unfair division of household labor as a key factor that leads to relationship distress and demise. But does it have to? Testing a priori predictions across three samples of individuals cohabiting with a romantic partner during the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 2,193, including 476 couples), we found an important exception to this rule. People who reported doing more of the household labor and who perceived the division as more unfair were less satisfied across the early weeks and ensuing months of the pandemic, but these negative effects disappeared when people felt appreciated by their partners. Feeling appreciated also appeared to buffer against the negative effects of doing less, suggesting that feeling appreciated may offset the relational costs of unequal division of labor, regardless of who contributes more. These findings generalized across gender, employment status, age, socioeconomic status, and relationship length.

Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort.

Achieving personal growth often requires experiencing discomfort. What if instead of tolerating discomfort (e.g., feeling awkward or uncomfortable), people actively sought it out? Because discomfort is usually experienced immediately and is easy to detect, we suggest that seeking discomfort as a signal of growth can increase motivation. Five experiments (total N = 2,163 adults) tested this prediction across various areas of personal growth: taking improvisation classes to increase self-confidence, engaging in expressive writing to process difficult emotions, becoming informed about the COVID-19 health crisis, opening oneself to opposing political viewpoints, and learning about gun violence. Across these areas of personal development, seeking discomfort as a signal of self-growth motivated engagement and increased perceived goal achievement relative to standard instructions. Consistent with our theorizing, results showed that these effects occurred only in areas of personal growth that cause immediate discomfort.

Assessing Change in Intervention Research: The Benefits of Composite Outcomes

Intervention research is often time- and resource-intensive, with numerous participants involved over extended periods of time. To maximize the value of intervention studies, multiple outcome measures are often included, either to ensure a diverse set of outcomes is being assessed or to refine assessments of specific outcomes. Here, we advocate for combining assessments, rather than relying on individual measures assessed separately, to better evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. Specifically, we argue that by pooling information from individual measures into a single outcome, composite scores can provide finer estimates of the underlying theoretical construct of interest while retaining important properties more sophisticated methods often forgo, such as transparency and interpretability. We describe different methods to compute, evaluate, and use composites depending on the goals, design, and data. To promote usability, we also provide a preregistration template that includes examples in the context of psychological interventions with supporting R code. Finally, we make a number of recommendations to help ensure that intervention studies are designed in a way that maximizes discoveries. A Shiny app and detailed R code accompany this article and are available at .

p Caring About (COVID-19 Related) Social Issues Signals Trustworthiness: Direct and Conceptual Replication of Zlatev (2019)

With three convenient samples (n = 1,087) and one sample representative for the German population in terms of age and gender (n = 210), we replicate research by Zlatev (2019) showing that perceived benevolence-based and perceived integrity-based trustworthiness increase with a target's level of caring about a social issue. We show that these results generalize to various issues ranging from environmental issues (i.e., installation of wind turbines in the North Sea) to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., online teaching to prevent the spread of the virus). Furthermore, we provide initial behavioral evidence for this effect by showing that transfers in a trust game increase with a target's caring about a social issue. All results are robust for age, gender, and social issue. To provide best estimates for the effect of a target's level of caring on perceived trustworthiness, we report results of three mini meta-analyses including our findings as well as the findings of the original research. Policy implications are discussed.

Sustained Stress Reduces the Age Advantages in Emotional Experience of Older Adults: Commentary on Carstensen et al. (2020).

Older age is characterized by more positive and less negative emotional experience. Recent work by Carstensen et al. (2020) demonstrated that the age advantages in emotional experience have persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic. In two studies, we replicated and extended this work. In Study 1, we conducted a large-scale test of the robustness of Carstensen and colleagues' findings using data from 23,350 participants in 63 countries. Our results confirm that age advantages in emotions have persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 2, we directly compared the age advantages before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in a within-participants study (N = 4,370). We found that the age advantages in emotions decreased during the pandemic. These findings are consistent with theoretical proposals that the age advantages reflect older adults' ability to avoid situations that are likely to cause negative emotions, which is challenging under conditions of sustained unavoidable stress.

The Benefits of Living With Close Others: A Longitudinal Examination of Mental Health Before and During a Global Stressor.

For better or worse, the people one lives with may exert a powerful influence on one's mental health, perhaps especially during times of stress. The COVID-19 pandemic-a large-scale stressor that prompted health recommendations to stay home to reduce disease spread-provided a unique context for examining how the people who share one's home may shape one's mental health. A seven-wave longitudinal study assessed mental health month to month before and during the pandemic (February through September 2020) in two diverse samples of U.S. adults (N = 656; N = 544). Preregistered analyses demonstrated that people living with close others (children and/or romantic partners) experienced better well-being before and during the pandemic's first 6 months. These groups also experienced unique increases in ill-being during the pandemic's onset, but parents' ill-being also recovered more quickly. These findings highlight the crucial protective function of close relationships for mental health both generally and amid a pandemic.

The Psychological Burden of the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Associated With Antisystemic Attitudes and Political Violence.

What are the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for people's political attitudes and behavior? We tested, specifically, whether the psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic relates to antisystemic attitudes (dissatisfaction with the fundamental social and political order), peaceful political activism, and political violence. Nationally representative two-wave panel data were collected via online surveys of adults in the United States, Denmark, Italy, and Hungary (ns = 6,131 and 4,568 in Waves 1 and 2, respectively). Overall, levels of antisystemic attitudes were low, and only a small share of interviewees reported behavioral intentions to participate in and actual participation in political violence. However, preregistered analyses indicated that perceived COVID-19 burden was associated with antisystemic attitudes and intentions to engage in political violence. In the United States, the burden of COVID-19 was also associated with self-reported engagement in violence surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests and counterprotests. We found less robust evidence that perceived COVID-19 burden was associated with peaceful activism.

Coping With Health Threats: The Costs and Benefits of Managing Emotions.

How people respond to health threats can influence their own health and, when people are facing communal risks, even their community's health. We propose that people commonly respond to health threats by managing their emotions with cognitive strategies such as reappraisal, which can reduce fear and protect mental health. However, because fear can also motivate health behaviors, reducing fear may also jeopardize health behaviors. In two diverse U.S. samples (N = 1,241) tracked across 3 months, sequential and cross-lagged panel mediation models indicated that reappraisal predicted lower fear about an ongoing health threat (COVID-19) and, in turn, better mental health but fewer recommended physical health behaviors. This trade-off was not inevitable, however: The use of reappraisal to increase socially oriented positive emotions predicted better mental health without jeopardizing physical health behaviors. Examining the costs and benefits of how people cope with health threats is essential for promoting better health outcomes for individuals and communities.

How Accurate Are Accuracy-Nudge Interventions? A Preregistered Direct Replication of Pennycook et al. (2020).

As part of the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, the present study consisted of a two-stage replication test of a central finding by Pennycook et al. (2020), namely that asking people to think about the accuracy of a single headline improves "truth discernment" of intentions to share news headlines about COVID-19. The first stage of the replication test (n = 701) was unsuccessful (p = .67). After collecting a second round of data (additional n = 882, pooled N = 1,583), we found a small but significant interaction between treatment condition and truth discernment (uncorrected p = .017; treatment: d = 0.14, control: d = 0.10). As in the target study, perceived headline accuracy correlated with treatment impact, so that treatment-group participants were less willing to share headlines that were perceived as less accurate. We discuss potential explanations for these findings and an unreported change in the hypothesis (but not the analysis plan) from the preregistration in the original study.

Feelings of Culpability: Just Following Orders Versus Making the Decision Oneself.

In five experiments (N = 1,490), participants were asked to imagine themselves as programmers of self-driving cars who had to decide how to program the car to respond in a potential accident: spare the driver or spare pedestrians. Alternatively, participants imagined that they were a mayor grappling with difficult moral dilemmas concerning COVID-19. Either they, themselves, had to decide how to program the car or which COVID-19 policy to implement (high-agency condition) or they were told by their superior how to act (low-agency condition). After learning that a tragic outcome occurred because of their action, participants reported their felt culpability. Although we expected people to feel less culpable about the outcome if they acted in accordance with their superior's injunction than if they made the decision themselves, participants actually felt more culpable when they followed their superior's order. Some possible reasons for this counterintuitive finding are discussed.

Age Advantages in Emotional Experience Persist Even Under Threat From the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating unprecedented, sustained, and unavoidable stress for the entire population, and older people are facing particularly heightened risk of contracting the virus and suffering severe complications, including death. The present study was conducted when the pandemic was spreading exponentially in the United States. To address important theoretical questions about age differences in emotional experience in times of crisis, we surveyed a representative sample of 945 Americans between the ages of 18 and 76 years and assessed the frequency and intensity of a range of positive and negative emotions. We also assessed perceived risk of contagion and complications from the virus, as well as personality, health, and demographic characteristics. Age was associated with relatively greater emotional well-being both when analyses did and did not control for perceived risk and other covariates. The present findings extend previous research about age and emotion by demonstrating that older adults' relatively better emotional well-being persists even in the face of prolonged stress.

The Emotional Path to Action: Empathy Promotes Physical Distancing and Wearing of Face Masks During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a major challenge to societies all over the globe. Two measures implemented in many countries to curb the spread of the disease are (a) minimizing close contact between people ("physical distancing") and (b) wearing of face masks. In the present research, we tested the idea that physical distancing and wearing of face masks can be the result of a prosocial emotional process-empathy for people most vulnerable to the virus. In four preregistered studies (N = 3,718, Western population), we found that (a) empathy indeed relates to the motivation to adhere to physical distancing and to wearing face masks and (b) inducing empathy for people most vulnerable to the virus promotes the motivation to adhere to these measures (whereas merely providing information about the importance of the measures does not). In sum, the present research provides a better understanding of the factors underlying the willingness to follow two important measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using Machine Learning to Generate Novel Hypotheses: Increasing Optimism About COVID-19 Makes People Less Willing to Justify Unethical Behaviors.

How can we nudge people to not engage in unethical behaviors, such as hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines, during the COVID-19 pandemic? Because past research on antecedents of unethical behavior has not provided a clear answer, we turned to machine learning to generate novel hypotheses. We trained a deep-learning model to predict whether or not World Values Survey respondents perceived unethical behaviors as justifiable, on the basis of their responses to 708 other items. The model identified optimism about the future of humanity as one of the top predictors of unethicality. A preregistered correlational study (N = 218 U.S. residents) conceptually replicated this finding. A preregistered experiment (N = 294 U.S. residents) provided causal support: Participants who read a scenario conveying optimism about the COVID-19 pandemic were less willing to justify hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines than participants who read a scenario conveying pessimism. The findings suggest that optimism can help reduce unethicality, and they document the utility of machine-learning methods for generating novel hypotheses.

Relational Mobility Predicts Faster Spread of COVID-19: A 39-Country Study.

It has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 is transmitted between individuals. It stands to reason that the spread of the virus depends on sociocultural ecologies that facilitate or inhibit social contact. In particular, the community-level tendency to engage with strangers and freely choose friends, called relational mobility, creates increased opportunities to interact with a larger and more variable range of other people. It may therefore be associated with a faster spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Here, we tested this possibility by analyzing growth curves of confirmed cases of and deaths due to COVID-19 in the first 30 days of the outbreaks in 39 countries. We found that growth was significantly accelerated as a function of a country-wise measure of relational mobility. This relationship was robust either with or without a set of control variables, including demographic variables, reporting bias, testing availability, and cultural dimensions of individualism, tightness, and government efficiency. Policy implications are also discussed.

Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention.

Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share. In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about accuracy. Furthermore, greater cognitive reflection and science knowledge were associated with stronger discernment. In Study 2, we found that a simple accuracy reminder at the beginning of the study (i.e., judging the accuracy of a non-COVID-19-related headline) nearly tripled the level of truth discernment in participants' subsequent sharing intentions. Our results, which mirror those found previously for political fake news, suggest that nudging people to think about accuracy is a simple way to improve choices about what to share on social media.