Affective Attitudes in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Dynamics of Negative Emotions and a Sense of Threat in Poles in the First Wave of the Pandemic.

For millions of people, the COVID-19 pandemic situation and its accompanying restrictions have been a source of threat and confrontation with negative emotions. The pandemic's universal and long-term character, as well as the ensuing drastic limitation of control over one's life, have made it necessary to work out adaptive strategies that would reduce negative experiences and eventually lead to the restoration of well-being. The aim of this research was to identify strategies that people use in response to a long-term threat that restore affective balance and a subjective sense of security. We registered selected manifestations of affective reactions to the pandemic situation. The researchers focused on the dynamics of changes in the areas of (1) experienced negative emotions (asked in an indirect way) and (2) a subjective feeling of threat regarding the pandemic (in three different contexts: Poland, Europe, and worldwide) during the first phase of the pandemic in Poland. It was expected that both the negative emotions and the sense of threat would decrease with time. In addition, it was anticipated that the physical distance would modify the assessment of the situation as threatening depending on the geographical proximity: in Poland, Europe, and worldwide. We used the mixed quasi-experimental design in the series of four studies conducted by Internet in March, May, June, and July 2020. The intensity of negative emotions and the sense of threat caused by the pandemic situation in Poland, Europe, and worldwide were measured. Despite the objective number of confirmed COVID-19 cases during each of the stages of the study, both the intensity of emotions attributed by participants as well as the feeling of threat were found to have decreased. In addition, surprisingly, a reversed effect of the distance was revealed: namely, a sense of threat experienced towards distant locations (Europe and the world) was found to be more acute when compared with the threat experienced in Poland. The obtained results are interpreted as a manifestation of adaptive perception of the threat that lies beyond one's control, which takes the form of unconscious, biased distortions: unrealistic optimism. The decrease in the intensity of negative emotions explains unrealistic absolute optimism, while the perception of the situation in Poland as less threatening than in Europe and around the world is predicted by unrealistic comparative optimism.

The influence of lateral implicit visual affective stimuli on the evaluation of neutral stimuli in humans.

It is now well established that implicit affect influences explicit judgments. Findings from neurobiological studies indicate a relationship between the functioning of the human cerebral hemispheres and emotions. The aim of the present research was to examine: (1) the direction of influence on neutral targets of suboptimal primes exposed for a duration of 16 ms, (2) whether the influence of affective suboptimal primes on neutral targets depends on the hemisphere to which the prime is directed. We predicted that affective primes exposed centrally would influence the evaluation of neutral target stimuli in a direction opposite to that of their explicit effect. Second, we posited that the influence of primes on the evaluation of neutral target stimuli would be different depending on the visual field in which the primes were exposed. We present combined data from four experiments, conducted in a visual affective priming paradigm. Neutral target stimuli (ideographs exposed for a duration of 2 seconds) were sub-optimally primed by photographs of faces expressing joy or disgust exposed in either the LVF, RVF or CVF. Subjects were asked "to state how negative/positive the character trait that is represented by a given ideograph is". The hypotheses were supported. The evaluation of ideographs after negative priming was more positive than the evaluation of ideographs after positive priming (indicating a contrast effect). This effect appeared only when affective priming stimuli were exposed in the central visual field. The evaluation of ideographs differed depending on the visual field of prime exposure conditions: exposure of affective primes in the right visual field resulted in more positive evaluations of ideographs than ideographs following primes in the left visual field.