Drawing on the robust literature on the benefits of gratitude, we present two preregistered studies demonstrating the advantages of expressing gratitude in the context of high-quality relationships-namely, gratitude for people who foster feelings of being cherished, protected, or accepted (i.e., safe haven gratitude). In a longitudinal experiment conducted in 2023 (N = 485), expressing gratitude for safe haven relationships and gratitude for gifts predicted immediate improvements in positive emotions and perceived partner responsiveness, along with reductions in negative emotions, relative to control, which predicted greater well-being and relationship quality 1 week later. Safe haven gratitude also predicted greater perceived partner responsiveness than gift gratitude, suggesting a unique mechanism differentiating this form of gratitude expression. Second, in a 2 (gratitude target: safe haven, gift) × 3 (gratitude expression: safe haven gratitude, gift gratitude, control) longitudinal experiment (N = 755) conducted in 2023-2024, we found that prompting people to consider a safe haven target led them to choose someone they perceived as more responsive than someone who gave them a gift. Further, when expressed to a safe haven target, both forms of gratitude expression were similarly beneficial; however, when expressed to a general target, focusing on the ways the person made participants feel cherished, protected, or accepted led to even greater feelings of gratitude than gift gratitude expression or control, which in turn predicted well-being and relationship quality 1 week later. Taken together, these findings highlight the well-being benefits of expressing gratitude for high-quality relationships and responsive behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Alexithymia, difficulty identifying and describing feelings, is associated with posttraumatic stress symptomology, yet the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We tested whether alexithymia's regulatory effects operate through disrupted emotion regulation monitoring, the capacity to accurately evaluate whether regulation has succeeded, or broader interoceptive deficits that compromise access to bodily emotional signals. Trauma-exposed participants (N = 49) completed baseline measures of alexithymia, posttraumatic stress symptoms, depression, anxiety, and interoceptive awareness, followed by three waves of ecological momentary assessment. At each wave, participants received five daily prompts for 5 consecutive days across 3 months (2,420 observations), reporting emotional clarity, perceived regulation success, body connection, and response-focused strategies (rumination, emotional hiding, pretending). Lagged models showed that among individuals high in alexithymia, higher perceived regulation success paradoxically predicted lower next-assessment emotional clarity, and greater emotional hiding and perceived success predicted worsening posttraumatic stress symptoms over 3 months. Interoceptive findings were mixed: Emotional awareness predicted better outcomes at the person level, but momentary body connection showed inconsistent associations. These findings reveal a paradoxical pattern in which subjective impressions of regulatory success precede worsening downstream emotional outcomes among individuals high in alexithymia. This pattern is consistent with a disrupted regulatory monitoring account, although whether it reflects miscalibrated evaluation, divergent regulatory goals, or systematic reporting biases cannot be determined from self-report alone and warrants replication in larger samples with objective indicators of emotional change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
In our increasingly digital world, understanding how negative online social experiences shape the value of social opportunities is critical. We examined whether social rejection alters individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for hypothetical social versus nonsocial experiences. In a two-part preregistered experiment (N = 98), participants uploaded Instagram photos and completed a simulated social media task in which they received randomized positive and negative feedback on their photos from anonymous peers. During the task, participants also made 100 decisions in which they could hypothetically "purchase" personally meaningful social and nonsocial activities. Participants preferred social experiences overall but, following social rejection, spent significantly less of an endowment on social options. Exploratory analyses revealed that individual differences in social connectedness and reward sensitivity modulated sensitivity to the relative cost of social experiences. These findings suggest that rejection does not reduce the underlying value of social connection but influences choice by increasing sensitivity to emotional and contextual factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Pictures depicting naturalistic scenes are widely used in studies of human emotion. However, the practical use of affective pictures is limited by several factors, including the difficulty of obtaining content-diverse, high-quality, openly accessible, and standardized stimuli that are necessary for specific research questions. The use of artificially generated (AI) pictures could address this limitation, but it is unclear if AI-generated pictures evoke reliable emotional responses. The present study sought to address these challenges by comparing emotional responses to AI-generated pictures with responses to original, standardized pictures. In two iterations of the study, standardized pictures containing pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant content were selected from the International Affective Picture System and other sources. Then, a matched AI counterpart was created for each original picture using generative deep neural networks. A total of 109 participants viewed the picture sets, while pupil diameter and electroencephalography data were recorded. Evaluative ratings of hedonic valence and emotional arousal were also collected. For both AI and original exemplars, pictures depicting emotional content elicited stronger responses than neutral content for ratings and electroencephalography-derived variables, with weaker effect sizes for the AI-generated pictures. Furthermore, picture-level analyses found that ratings and electroencephalography measures were strongly correlated between matched AI and original pictures. Pupil data showed the expected content effects in the second iteration of the study but not in the first iteration. Together, this initial study suggests that AI-generated picture sets can effectively elicit well-established self-reported affect and physiological responses, presenting a promising avenue for future studies of human emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
