Results from large·scale twin and adoption studies over the last several decades have ostensibly suggested that parent· ing practices have little or no effect on the long-term out· come of children. This paper aims to reconcile these counterintuitive empirical findings with the intuition that the way children are raised by their parents certainly does have an effect on the people they eventuall...

Children of depressed mothers are at a higher risk of developing depression in their lifetime compared to children of nondepressed mothers. Based on the tripartite model of depression and anxiety, low positive affect is the core symptom of depression. The current study examined the affect pattern of children of depressed and nondepressed mothers in general and in response to stimuli. Participan...

This paper addresses the question of whether psychological distress and subjective well-being are the opposite poles of the same axis of mental health or independent constructs that should be measured on two independent axes. The measures used in this study originate from a preliminary ethnosemantic study and the content analysis of narratives of psychological distress and well-being episodes e...

Until recently, it was widely held that happiness fluctuates around set points, so that neither individuals nor societies can lastingly increase their happiness. Even though recent research showed that some individuals move enduringly above or below their set points, this does not refute the idea that the happiness levels of entire societies remain fixed. Our article, however, challenges this i...

We examined relationships among individual differences in trait emotions and the emotionmodulated startle-eyeblink response. In particular, we examined the extent to which trait anger, which is negative in valence, would be associated with a pattern of approach motivation in startle eyeblink responses to appetitive stimuli. Self-reported trait emotions were compared with emotion-modulated start...

We present two studies aimed at resolving experimentally whether religion increases prosocial behavior in the anonymous dictator game. Participants allocated more money to anonymous strangers when God concepts were implicitly activated compared to neutral or no concepts. This effect was at least as large as when concepts associated with secular moral institutions were primed. Self-reported reli...

This study tested the relevance of ten psychological needs in emotional well-being among older and younger adults in two cultures (the US and South Korea). Participants were asked to recall their “most satisfying event” for the past month, and then were asked to evaluate the relevance of ten psychological needs to that event. Results indicated that both age and cultural groups generally emphasi...

A behavior genetics perspective suggests both social and biological forces influence human behavior, including highly specialized media and communication behaviors. In this paper, I use a behavior genetics framework and twin study data from the 2013 Midlife in the United States (MIDUS III) survey to examine how both environmental and genetic factors contribute to social media use. By applying a...

Emotional intelligence is an indispensable facet of human intelligence and one of the most important factors for a successful social life. Endowing machines with this kind of intelligence towards affective human–machine interaction, however, is not an easy task. It becomes more complex with the fact that human beings use several modalities jointly to interpret affective states, since emotion af...

We report work in progress on adding affect-detection to an existing e-drama program, a text-based software system for (human) dramatic improvisation in simple virtual scenarios, for use primarily in learning contexts. The system allows a human director to monitor improvisations and make interventions, for instance in reaction to excessive, insufficient or inappropriate emotions in the characte...