Evolution of the Moral Lexicon.

Morality is central to social well-being and cognition, and moral lexicon is a key device for human communication of moral concepts and experiences. How was the moral lexicon formed? We explore this open question and hypothesize that words evolved to take on abstract moral meanings from concrete and grounded experiences. We test this hypothesis by analyzing semantic change and formation of over 800 words from the English Moral Foundations Dictionary and the Historical Thesaurus of English over the past hundreds of years.

Culture and Awe: Understanding Awe as a Mixed Emotion.

Unlabelled: Recent work is establishing awe as an important positive emotion that offers physical and psychological benefits. However, early theorizing suggests that awe's experience is often tinged with fear. How then, do we reconcile emergent positive conceptualizations of awe with its more fearful elements? We suggest that positive conceptualizations of awe may partially reflect modern Western experiences of this emotion, which make up the majority of participant samples when studying awe.

Thank You for Changing: Gratitude Promotes Autonomous Motivation and Successful Partner Regulation.

Romantic partners often attempt to improve their relationship by changing each other's traits and behaviors, but such partner regulation is often unsuccessful. We examined whether gratitude expressed by agents (i.e.

Shared Hearts and Minds: Physiological Synchrony During Empathy.

Unlabelled: Empathy is a multidimensional construct that includes changes in cognitive, affective, and physiological processes. However, the physiological processes that contribute to empathic responding have received far less empirical attention. Here, we investigated whether physiological synchrony emerged during an empathy-inducing activity in which individuals disclosed a time of suffering while their romantic partner listened and responded ( = 111 couples).

Exploring the impact of awe on the multifaceted construct of empathy.

Empathy helps us navigate social interactions and promotes prosocial behaviors like caregiving and helping. Here, we explored whether awe, a key self-transcendent and epistemic emotion, could encourage greater empathy across seven diverse student and community samples collected between 2020 and 2022. Empathy is a multifaceted construct; thus, we assessed performance on a range of empathy measures including perspective taking accuracy (Study 2), empathic accuracy (Study 3; preregistered), emotion contagion and compassion (Study 4).

Turning toward or away from God: COVID-19 and changes in religious devotion.

Major stressors can influence religiosity, making some people more religious, while making others less religious. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted a mixed-method study with a nationally representative sample of religiously affiliated American adults (N = 685) to assess group differences between those who decreased, stayed the same, or increased in their religious devotion. In quantitative analyses we evaluated differences on sociodemographic variables, religious behaviors, individual differences, prosocial emotions, well-being, and COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors.

Feeling Appreciated Predicts Prosocial Motivation in Avoidantly Attached Individuals.

Prosocial motivation is an important ingredient for satisfying relationships. However, individuals high in attachment avoidance-those who fear closeness and prefer independence-often display reduced prosocial motivation for their romantic partner. In two daily experience studies ( = 324), we examined whether feeling appreciated by a romantic partner would buffer this negative link.

When We're Asked to Change: The Role of Suppression and Reappraisal in Partner Change Outcomes.

Receiving a request to change from a romantic partner can evoke intense emotional responses that hinder change progress and conflict resolution. As such, investigating how those being asked to change (i.e.

Evolution of emotion semantics.

Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression that their meaning is static, but we propose this is not the case.

When the ones we love misbehave: Exploring moral processes within intimate bonds.

How do we react when our romantic partners, friends, or family members behave unethically? When close others misbehave, it generates a powerful conflict between observers' moral values and their cherished relationships. Previous research has almost exclusively studied moral perception in a social vacuum by investigating responses to the transgressions of strangers; therefore, little is known about how these responses unfold in the context of intimate bonds. Here we systematically examine the impact of having a close relationship with a transgressor on perceptions of that transgressor, the relationship, and the self.

Awe helps us remember why it is important to forget the self.

Awe is a self-transcendent emotion that exerts a powerful impact on the self. Through diminishing the ego, awe may help cultivate interconnection, wisdom, meaning, and purpose.

Is Touch in Romantic Relationships Universally Beneficial for Psychological Well-Being? The Role of Attachment Avoidance.

Affectionate touch is crucial for well-being. However, attachment avoidance is associated with negative attitudes toward touch. We tested two preregistered hypotheses about how attachment avoidance influences the association between touch in romantic couples and psychological well-being.

The Psychology of Entrenched Privilege: High Socioeconomic Status Individuals From Affluent Backgrounds Are Uniquely High in Entitlement.

As rates of intergenerational social mobility decline, it is increasingly important to understand the psychological consequences of entrenched socioeconomic privilege. Here, we explore whether current and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) are interactively related to entitlement, such that among currently high SES individuals, those from affluent backgrounds are likely to feel uniquely high levels of entitlement, whereas currently low SES individuals feel low entitlement regardless of their backgrounds. A meta-analysis of four exploratory studies (total = 3,105) found that currently high SES individuals who were also raised in high SES households were especially inclined to report feeling entitled, a pattern that was robust across three indicators of SES: income, education, and subjective SES.

Profiles in empathy: Different empathic responses to emotional and physical suffering.

Empathy often occurs when individuals witness another suffer. Researchers who study empathy have tried to identify reliable behavioral outcomes, affective responses, and physiological changes associated with its experience. However to date, these markers of empathy have remained elusive.

A multicomponent approach toward understanding emotion regulation in schizophrenia.

Objectives: Emotion deficits are well documented in people with schizophrenia. Far less is known about their ability to implement emotion regulation strategies. We sought to explore whether people with schizophrenia can modify their emotion responses similar to controls.

Unethical and inept? The influence of moral information on perceptions of competence.

While moral character heavily influences global evaluations of others (Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014), its causal effect on perceptions of others' competence (i.e., one's knowledge, skills, and abilities) is less clear.

Awe and humility.

Humility is a foundational virtue that counters selfish inclinations such as entitlement, arrogance, and narcissism (Tangney, 2000). We hypothesize that experiences of awe promote greater humility. Guided by an appraisal-tendency framework of emotion, we propose that when individuals encounter an entity that is vast and challenges their worldview, they feel awe, which leads to self-diminishment and subsequently humility.

Awe, the diminished self, and collective engagement: Universals and cultural variations in the small self.

Awe has been theorized as a collective emotion, one that enables individuals to integrate into social collectives. In keeping with this theorizing, we propose that awe diminishes the sense of self and shifts attention away from individual interests and concerns. In testing this hypothesis across 6 studies (N = 2137), we first validate pictorial and verbal measures of the small self; we then document that daily, in vivo, and lab experiences of awe, but not other positive emotions, diminish the sense of the self.

The dark side of the sublime: Distinguishing a threat-based variant of awe.

Theoretical conceptualizations of awe suggest this emotion can be more positive or negative depending on specific appraisal processes. However, the emergent scientific study of awe rarely emphasizes its negative side, classifying it instead as a positive emotion. In the present research we tested whether there is a more negative variant of awe that arises in response to vast, complex stimuli that are threatening (e.

Socioeconomic Status and Social Support: Social Support Reduces Inflammatory Reactivity for Individuals Whose Early-Life Socioeconomic Status Was Low.

Low socioeconomic status (SES) during childhood confers risk for adverse health in adulthood. Accumulating evidence suggests that this may be due, in part, to the association between lower childhood SES and higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Drawing from literature showing that low childhood SES predicts exaggerated physiological reactivity to stressors and that lower SES is associated with a more communal, socially attuned orientation, we hypothesized that inflammatory reactivity would be more greatly affected by cues of social support among individuals whose childhood SES was low than among those whose childhood SES was high.

The role of interpersonal processes in shaping inflammatory responses to social-evaluative threat.

In response to social-evaluative threat induced in the laboratory, lower (compared to higher) subjective social class of a participant predicts greater increases in the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6). In spite of the interpersonal nature of social-evaluation, little work has explored whether characteristics of the evaluator shape physiological responses in this context. In the current study, in a sample of 190 college students (male=66), we explored whether one's subjective social class interacts with the perceived social class of an evaluator to predict changes in Oral Mucosal Transudate (OMT) IL-6 in response to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST).

Affective and physiological responses to the suffering of others: compassion and vagal activity.

Compassion is an affective response to another's suffering and a catalyst of prosocial behavior. In the present studies, we explore the peripheral physiological changes associated with the experience of compassion. Guided by long-standing theoretical claims, we propose that compassion is associated with activation in the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve.

Positive affect and markers of inflammation: discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines.

Negative emotions are reliably associated with poorer health (e.g., Kiecolt-Glaser, McGuire, Robles, & Glaser, 2002), but only recently has research begun to acknowledge the important role of positive emotions for our physical health (Fredrickson, 2003).

Class and compassion: socioeconomic factors predict responses to suffering.

Previous research indicates that lower-class individuals experience elevated negative emotions as compared with their upper-class counterparts. We examine how the environments of lower-class individuals can also promote greater compassionate responding-that is, concern for the suffering or well-being of others. In the present research, we investigate class-based differences in dispositional compassion and its activation in situations wherein others are suffering.

Social influences on female choice in green anole lizards (Anolis carolinensis).

We conducted an experiment on female Anolis carolinensis lizards to investigate whether social factors influenced their selection of an end-chamber in a test arena. We tested (1) whether characteristics of males previously seen in the end-chambers would influence female choice and (2) whether the presence of other females simultaneously choosing would influence choice. In experiment one, females observed a large and a small male in the end-chambers prior to choosing.