Extra-Curricular Activities and Well-Being: Results From a Survey of Undergraduate University Students During COVID-19 Lockdown Restrictions.

Participation in extra-curricular activities has been found to associate with increased well-being. Here we investigated in a survey ( = 786) what activities university students at a Canadian university engaged in during the stressful COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in April, 2020, which coincided with a novel online exam period, and how these activities related to perceived well-being, anxiety (STAI-S), social aspects of activities, and personality. Sixty-five percentage of students scored in the high anxiety category of the STAI-S, an alarming statistic given that only 24% had reached out for professional supports.

Emotional reactivity and perspective-taking in individuals with and without severe depressive symptoms.

The perspective-taking ability to imagine another person's feelings and thoughts is paramount for successful communication. This study pursued two questions regarding the link between perspective-taking and depressive symptomatology in a task where participants provided responses to words ranging in their positivity. First, we examined in a between-participants experimental manipulation how the presence of depressive symptoms influenced participants' emotional reactivity.

Norms for 10,491 Spanish words for five discrete emotions: Happiness, disgust, anger, fear, and sadness.

The discrete emotion theory proposes that affective experiences can be reduced to a limited set of universal "basic" emotions, most commonly identified as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Here we present norms for 10,491 Spanish words for those five discrete emotions collected from a total of 2,010 native speakers, making it the largest set of norms for discrete emotions in any language to date. When used in conjunction with the norms from Hinojosa, Martínez-García et al.

Sliding into happiness: A new tool for measuring affective responses to words.

Reliable measurement of affective responses is critical for research into human emotion. Affective evaluation of words is most commonly gauged on multiple dimensions-including valence (positivity) and arousal-using a rating scale. Despite its popularity, this scale is open to criticism: It generates ordinal data that is often misinterpreted as interval, it does not provide the fine resolution that is essential by recent theoretical accounts of emotion, and its extremes may not be properly calibrated.

Norms of valence and arousal for 14,031 Spanish words.

Most current models of research on emotion recognize valence (how pleasant a stimulus is) and arousal (the level of activation or intensity that a stimulus elicits) as important components in the classification of affective experiences (Barrett, 1998; Kuppens, Tuerlinckx, Russell, & Barrett, 2012). Here we present a set of norms for valence and arousal for a very large set of Spanish words, including items from a variety of frequencies, semantic categories, and parts of speech, including a subset of conjugated verbs. In this regard, we found that there were significant but very small differences between the ratings for conjugations of the same verb, validating the practice of applying the ratings for infinitives to all derived forms of the verb.