Challenges posed by climate change are increasing, and residential electricity use is a major contributor. Two ways for individuals to help mitigate this issue are reducing electricity consumption and investing in renewable energy sources. A large body of research has shown that social norms are effective in encouraging various pro-environmental behaviors such as energy use conservation, but less information is available about their ability to encourage investment in renewable energies. Research on incentives and fees has also demonstrated their potential impacts on pro-environmental behaviors in general, but it is less comprehensive regarding sustainable energy behaviors specifically. The combined influence of social norms with incentives or fees on pro-environmental energy behaviors has yet to be explored in the literature. In this study, three experiments are conducted to investigate norms, incentives and fees, and their combined effect on pro-environmental energy decisions. Through surveys that exposed participants to each of these stimuli, participants' attitudes, perceptions, and intended behaviors were measured. Data were collected about various consumer energy decisions along with the consumers' willingness to pay for renewable energy. Results of the survey experiments show that exposure to incentives and fees framed to reduce consumption significantly increased participants’ perceptions of norms and willingness to pay for solar panels when compared to a control group, whereas other manipulations such as social norms and incentives and fees framed to motivate clean energy investments were not impactful on perceptions and intended behaviors. These results uncover the potential to decrease emissions resulting from residential electricity use by introducing incentives and fees on electricity bills and motivating individuals to reduce their consumption and invest in solar panel systems. These behavior changes will contribute to the sustainable development of electricity markets, reducing emissions and costs for individuals while increasing the adoption of renewable energy.

For the past two years, the editors of this special section have worked in close collaboration to consider the various ways in which human rights and rights-based approaches can promote public health and mental health policies and practices in the prevention of mass atrocity crimes. In June 2019, we convened academics and practitioners engaged in work at the intersections of these disciplines across various contexts and at various intervention points along the continuum of harms that can be defined as atrocity crimes. Represented among these scholars and practitioners were psychologists, sociologists, social psychologists, epidemiologists, public health practitioners, political scientists, legal scholars, human rights practitioners, anthropologists, historians, peace studies scholars, and philosophers. All participants recognized that multidisciplinary tools and frames were critical to their work in their respective disciplines to identify effective strategies to disrupt causal pathways of identity-based violence, human rights abuses, and mass atrocity crimes. One result of this work is this special section, where the authors of the collected papers dive deeply into the public health and mental health rights dilemmas that emerge from prevention efforts related to identity-based violence and mass atrocity crimes—including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.1 The authors examine the ways in which we can adapt rights and health frameworks, methods, research, tools, and practice toward a more sophisticated and truly interdisciplinary understanding and application of atrocity prevention. In their totality, the papers demonstrate the state of these current fields and the intersecting themes within human rights, public health, mental health, and mass atrocity prevention and, importantly, future potential directions for next collaborative steps. The protection and fulfillment of mental health rights is critically important within the larger principle of the right to health, yet it receives disparate attention within the biomedical model. As the editorial for HHRJ’s special section on mental health and human rights in 2020 stated, “there is no health without mental health, but there is no mental health without human rights.”2 Discrimination, disempowerment, and social

It has been argued that the international cooperation needed to deal with global problems requires the development of a global community. We hypothesized that the sense of belonging to such a community would be promoted if we could increase a general sense of hopefulness about humanity and that such a sense of hopefulness would be influenced by the news to which persons are subjected. Participants were asked to visit news websites with different emotional tones. Those sent to a typical news site or to a fashion site showed a small but significant decrease in their sense of global community. Those sent to a nongovernmental organization (NGO) website featuring solutions-oriented news showed a significant increase. The latter site provoked greater admiration, appreciation, and hope, and less anger, disgust, and fear. Increase in a sense of global community was predicted by the extent to which the NGO site provoked both admiration and fear.

The alleviation of world suffering requires action on the part of individuals. Yet, for these persons, awareness of and attention to suffering combined with a felt sense of connection may function as both assets and liabilities. While these capacities enable the galvanization necessary to incite actions aimed at the relief of suffering, they may come at powerful costs, undermining the well-being of advocates and the efficacy of their labors. Personal and social resources have a part to play in how we manage our experience of emotions and our beliefs about social change. Privately, caregivers, advocates and activists might learn to deliberately recognize and direct their individual capacities for attention, awareness, and connection toward more effective responses. Socially, communities within the advocacy field play an equally imperative role in the emotional experience of its members. Communal norms that construct advocacy as necessarily onerous may fail to acknowledge the limitations of caregivers and advocates, while supportive communities that prioritize connection and celebration may alleviate helping stress. Sustainable social change will require an awareness of the ways in which individual beliefs and behaviors, institutional policies, and cultural norms may hamper the alleviation of suffering.

Muzafer Sherif insisted that research ought to have sure bearing on actualities and that problem selected for investigation be significant, not trivial. Sherif's empirical research on norm change within groups and across time can be seen as part of a larger project of understanding psychological processes underlying the transformation of norms within societies. While Sherif is not widely recognized for his theoretical work outlining social change processes, his contributions provided a foundation for much of the subsequent social psychological literature on social movements, intergroup relations, and power dynamics. Sherif's experimental work has laid bare the basic dynamics of norm formation and change in a controlled environment. Sherif argued that social movements can be effective in transforming social norms over time, and process is often gradual. The slow rate of large-scale changes in norms is a product of the fact that new norms that deviate from status quo norms to a great degree are less likely to be adopted.

This chapter offers a conceptual framework for the role of emotions and empathy in the desire and choice to alleviate suffering. Because the locus of the suffering (self, other, or social) may change the role of emotions in suffering, they are discussed collectively and separately. The structure of the empathy process is outlined in ten steps or phases, including emotional resonance and self-regulation. This larger perspective on empathy encompasses shared experience as well as the potential for compassion and altruism. Mindfulness is discussed in terms of its role in readiness for the alleviation of suffering through exercises in resonance and self-regulation. The chapter ends by showing how emotional processes can apply to large-scale social suffering and the potential they hold for contributing to even broader relief.

Two studies investigated the relationship between emotions and political proposals affecting national security. Study One examined the extent to which proposals, ostensibly undertaken to produce security, may actually increase anxiety. Participants (N=131) were exposed to proposals for either missile defense or a Department of Peace, which either included or excluded information concerning the proposal's author. Neither proposal affected general anxiety level, but participants exposed to the proposal for missile defense reported feeling less secure that the nation could be protected from attack. Belief in efficacy was relatively low, significantly lower than the modest belief in efficacy reported by those exposed to the proposal for a Department of Peace. Ratings of effectiveness were not significantly biased by author affiliation. Study Two examined the impact of induced affective state on judgments of program efficacy. University students (N = 36) were emotionally primed with comforting or threatening s...

This study has three aims: to create and validate a measure for the experience of human security, to begin exploring how the experience of security relates to the socioeconomic status of the community in which one resides and the emotional climate and culture of peace of one's nation, and to examine what personal factors influence the experience of security within different communities. To assess the security experienced by individuals, we developed a self‐report questionnaire based on seven objective aspects of human security outlined by the United Nations: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political security. We compared middle and lower class communities in the United States and Costa Rica and examined the extent to which individuals depend upon themselves and others in these different communities. Our results show that it is possible to measure the experience of human security, that this experience depends more on national emotional climate than socioeconomic status, and that for community samples, a large part of human security depends on support from family and friends.