Empathy is associated with older adults' social behaviors and verbal emotional expressions throughout the day.

Empathy plays a crucial role in promoting older adults' interpersonal experiences, but it remains unclear how these benefits of empathy occur. To address this gap, we examined associations between empathy and how older adults behave and express emotions during their daily interpersonal encounters. Participants included 268 adults aged 65+ (46% men, n = 124) from the Daily Experiences and Well-being Study.

Daily Electronic Media Use and Sleep in Late Life.

Objectives: Daily electronic media use, including television viewing and computer use, is common in older adulthood. Yet, increased electronic media usage may disrupt nightly sleep, leading to sleeping fewer hours and more sleep disruptions. The current study examined these relationships in older adulthood, as well as the potential buffering effect of having a regular sleep schedule.

Characteristics of K-12 Teachers Considering Leaving Due to COVID-19 and for Other Reasons.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had drastic effects on K-12 teachers. Researchers partnered with a teacher advisory board to identify factors associated with K-12 teachers' consideration of leaving teaching during Fall 2020.

Methods: A web-based survey focused on teachers' working experiences was emailed to school union membership listservs in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.

Nightly Sleep Predicts Next-Morning Expectations for Stress and Positive Experiences.

Objective: Abundant research has linked nightly sleep as an antecedent of daily psychosocial experiences; however, less is known about sleep's influence on daily expectations of these experiences. Therefore, this research examined the day-to-day associations of sleep quality, duration, and efficiency with next-day expectations for stress(ors) and positive experiences, as well as whether these expectations were related to end-of-day reports of physical symptoms.

Methods: In Study 1, U.

Daily worry, rumination, and sleep in late life.

Objective: Perseverative thinking (e.g., worry/rumination) is a common response to stress, and can be detrimental to well-being.

"Think of the situation in a positive light": A look at cognitive reappraisal, affective reactivity and health☆.

Rationale: How individuals regulate their emotions is critical for maintaining health and well-being. For example, reframing a stressful situation in a positive light, a form of cognitive reappraisal, is beneficial for both physical and mental health as well as subjective well-being. However, it is currently unclear why this relationship exists.

Sleep Variability and Inflammation in Midlife and Older Women.

Objective: Shorter sleep duration and more sleep disturbances, in addition to greater night-to-night fluctuations in sleep (intraindividual variability; IIV), have been associated with elevated inflammation. However, these associations were only at the between-person level. The current study examined the within-person relationship between mean levels and IIV of sleep duration and sleep disturbances and C-reactive protein (CRP) in healthy, aging women.

Physical Activity and Daily Stress Processes in Older Adulthood.

Objectives: Older adults who are physically active report lower levels of stress. Less is known about the links between physical activity and exposure and reactivity to stressful events in daily life. The current study examined within-person associations between actigraphy-assessed daily physical activity and exposure and affective reactivity to naturally occurring interpersonal stressors.

Advancing the Study of Resilience to Daily Stressors.

Historically, studies of childhood and adult resilience have typically focused on adaptation to chronic life adversities, such as poverty and maltreatment, or isolated and potentially traumatic events, such as bereavement and serious illness. Here, we present a complementary view and suggest that stressors experienced in daily life may also forecast individual health and well-being. We argue that daily process approaches that incorporate intensive sampling of individuals in natural settings can provide powerful insights into unfolding adaptational processes.

Discrimination and health: The mediating role of daily stress processes.

Objective: Exposure to discrimination is consistently linked with worse physical and mental health outcomes. One potential reason is that discriminatory experiences shape the way people interpret and affectively react to daily stressful events which in turn impacts health. The current study examined the role of these two daily psychological stress processes as a pathway linking the longitudinal association between perceived discrimination and health outcomes.

How and why could smiling influence physical health? A conceptual review.

Smiling has been a topic of interest to psychologists for decades, with a myriad of studies tying this behavior to well-being. Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the nature of the connections between smiling and physical health. We review the literature connecting both naturally occurring smiles and experimentally manipulated smiles to physical health and health-relevant outcomes.

Effects of a workplace intervention on daily stressor reactivity.

Heightened affective and physical reactions to daily stressful events predict poor long-term physical and mental health outcomes. It is unknown, however, if an experimental manipulation designed to increase interpersonal resources at work can reduce associations between daily stressors and physical and affective well-being. The present study tests the effects of a workplace intervention designed to increase supervisor support for family and personal life and schedule control on employees' affective and physical reactivity to daily stressors in different domains (i.

Eudaemonic Well-Being in Midlife Women: Change in and Correspondence Between Concurrent and Retrospective Reports.

Concurrent and retrospective reports correspond for personality, affect, and coping. The present study described how autonomy, competence, and relatedness components of eudaemonic well-being (EWB) change over days and months and tested correspondences of daily and retrospective reports between and within people. Midlife and older (50-75 years) women (N = 200) completed online diaries daily for 1 week for 9 bursts over 2 years and answered questionnaires at the end of each burst (burst n = 1,529).

Impact of the COVID-19 Shutdown on Mental Health in Appalachia by Working Status.

Introduction: To slow the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, businesses shutdown in Spring 2020. Research has indicated the impact on frontlines workers, yet little is known about the impact on those who were not working outside the home or switched to working remotely.

Purpose: The purpose of this report is to identify the financial and healthcare issues and mental health impact of the COVID-19 shutdown on Appalachians by worker categories.

Work-family spillover stress predicts health outcomes across two decades.

Rationale: Work is a common source of stress for many adults, arising from situations that occur at work (e.g., job demands) as well as the worries and responsibilities that people take home with them (negative work-family spillover).

Positive Encounters as a Buffer: Pain and Sleep Disturbances in Older Adults' Everyday Lives.

To test whether older adults' pain was bidirectionally associated with nighttime sleep disturbances and whether daily positive encounters attenuated these associations. Participants ( = 292, = 73.71 years old) from the indicated pain and positive encounters with close partners (e.

Mean Levels and Variability in Psychological Well-Being and Associations With Sleep in Midlife and Older Women.

Background: Disturbed sleep is prevalent in older adulthood and particularly among women. Greater psychological well-being (PWB) is associated with better sleep, but intraindividual variability in PWB has not been examined.

Purpose: The current study examined whether mean levels and variability in PWB were associated with sleep disturbances in midlife and older women.

Affective recovery from stress and its associations with sleep.

Good sleep habits are important for emotional well-being. Studies have linked sleep with people's ability to regulate their emotions in response to stressful events, yet little is known specifically about how sleep is related to a person's ability to recover affectively from a stressful experience. The current study examined self-reported sleep habits and their associations with both positive and negative affective recovery from a laboratory-induced stressor.

Positive Emotions Experienced on Days of Stress are Associated with Less Same Day and Next Day Negative Emotion.

Positive emotions help us during times of stress. They serve to replenish resources and provide relief from stressful experiences. Positive emotions may be particularly beneficial during times of stress by dampening negative emotional reactivity and quickening recovery from stressful events.

Affect variability and sleep: Emotional ups and downs are related to a poorer night's rest.

Objectives: Many studies have documented the strong associations between well-being and mean levels of both positive and negative affect. A growing number of studies are examining how fluctuations in daily reported emotional experience, known as affect variability, is related to health outcomes. Sleep is a critical correlate of healthy in functioning in late life.

Let It Go: Lingering Negative Affect in Response to Daily Stressors Is Associated With Physical Health Years Later.

The way we respond to life's daily stressors has strong implications for our physical health. Researchers have documented the detrimental effects of initial emotional reactivity to daily stressors on future physical health outcomes but have yet to examine the effects of emotions that linger after a stressor occurs. The current study investigated how negative affect that lingers the day after a minor stressor occurs is associated with health-related outcomes.

Age and the Factor Structure of Emotional Experience in Adulthood.

Objectives: The current study examined the factor structure of emotional experience across adults 34-50, 51-65, and 66-84 year olds.

Method: Participants (N = 2,022) were asked about 14 negative and 13 positive emotions across 8 days in the National Study of Daily Experiences II study. Factor analysis computed both inter-individual factors (between-person structure of emotional experience) and intra-individual factors (factors describing emotions in daily life) for each age group.

Personality and stressor-related affect.

Greater increases in negative affect and greater decreases in positive affect on days stressors occur portend poorer mental and physical health years later. Although personality traits influence stressor-related affect, only neuroticism and extraversion among the Big Five personality traits have been examined in any detail. Moreover, personality traits may shape how people appraise daily stressors, yet few studies have examined how stressor-related appraisals may account for associations between personality and stressor-related affect.

The association of daily physical symptoms with future health.

Rationale: Daily physical symptoms play a critical role in health and illness experiences. Despite their daily prevalence, the ability of these symptoms to predict future health status is debated.

Objective: The current study examined whether physical symptom reports predict future health outcomes independent of trait measures of emotion.