Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, is experienced across cultures and is often linked to positive outcomes. The question of whether and how people reflect nostalgically upon positive moments within broadly negative contexts, however, remains underexplored. Accordingly, in three studies, we examined nostalgic memories and feelings for the Covid-19 lockdowns. Study 1 demonstrated that participants' positive memories from this troublesome period contained nostalgic content and induced nostalgic feelings. A qualitative analysis of nostalgic memories collected in Study 2 identified social connection with close others as a central theme. Finally, Study 3 provided some support for the role of social connection with close others in accounting for the relationship between recalling positive (vs. valence-unspecified) lockdown memories and nostalgic feelings, although evidence for this indirect effect was not consistent across all analyses. These findings highlight nostalgia's potential to foster emotional resilience and identify silver linings following challenging life events when prompted.

Past research has shown that secure attachment promotes hedonic or fluctuating forms of happiness by enhancing perceptions of goal progress. The present study extends this work by examining authentic-durable happiness—a more stable, peace-oriented form of well-being—and by positioning psychological momentum (PM) as an experiential construct of exploration. Regular exercisers (N = 511) completed online questionnaires assessing secure attachment, authentic-durable happiness, and PM over the previous four weeks. To clarify the interrelationships among these constructs, we tested two competing structural equation models. Model 1, grounded in a hedonic perspective, specified PM as a mediator between secure attachment and authentic-durable happiness. Model 2, informed by eudaimonic and self-determination theory perspectives, specified authentic-durable happiness as a mediator between secure attachment and PM. Results indicated stronger support for Model 2: Authentic-durable happiness partially mediated the relationship between secure attachment and PM. These findings highlight authentic-durable happiness as a key psychological resource linking secure attachment to sustained engagement. By contrasting hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives, the study advances attachment theory beyond fluctuating happiness and provides preliminary evidence that secure attachment may foster enduring well-being, which in turn may energize perceptions of PM. Overall, this work introduces PM as a phenomenological manifestation of exploration and underscores the value of examining both transient and durable happiness in understanding the motivational impact of secure attachment.

Although Jewish people in the US are often racialized (i.e., perceived by others) as White, Jewish Americans vary in the extent to which they consider themselves White, and in how strongly they identify with being Jewish. Based on prior findings that identifying with a White ethnic subgroup (e.g., Irish, Italian) can reduce prejudice toward racial and ethnic minorities, we predicted that strongly identified Jewish Americans would exhibit less intergroup bias than weakly identified Jewish Americans. For the present research, we recruited participants whose religious affiliation was Jewish but who self-identified as racially White. In a preregistered correlational study, Jewish identification was associated with lower bias, whereas White identification was associated with greater bias, toward Whites relative to racial/ethnic minorities. The relationship between Jewish identification and intergroup bias was accounted for by high Jewish identifiers’ perceptions that they could personally contribute to diversity in groups and organizations. Across three meta-analyzed experiments, participants whose religious minority (Jewish) identity was made salient exhibited less intergroup bias than did control participants, and in one preregistered experiment, perceived personal contributions to diversity mediated the effect of condition on intergroup bias. Implications for the forms of ethnic identity that predict more versus less intergroup bias in an increasingly multicultural society are discussed.

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979).

The present research examined how nostalgia influences temporal self-appraisals and whether those appraisals relate to current mood. Across two studies, participants recalled either an ordinary or nostalgic memory and provided appraisals of their present and past selves. Participants who recalled nostalgic memories evaluated their past selves more positively than their present selves, whereas the reverse occurred for those who recalled ordinary memories. Those who recalled a positive future event also evaluated their future selves more positively than their present selves. Nostalgia simultaneously enhanced positive mood by heightening favorable evaluations of past selves and diminished positive mood by heightening unfavorable evaluations of present selves. The current work supports a temporal-selves framework that allows for a more nuanced portrait of the nostalgic experience.

The present research investigated the relationship between meaning perceptions and the structure of counterfactual thoughts. In Study 1, participants reflected on how turning points in their lives could have turned out otherwise. Those who were instructed to engage in subtractive (e.g. If only I had not done X horizontal ellipsis ") counterfactual thinking (SCT) about those turning points subsequently reported higher meaning perceptions than did those who engaged in additive (e.g. 'If only I had done X horizontal ellipsis ') counterfactual thinking (ACT). In Study 2, participants who reflected upon life events from the perspective of understanding the past (versus preparing for the future) tended to engage in more SCT than ACT. Finally, in Study 3, participants engaged in more SCT than ACT about life events whose meaning was perceived as certain (as opposed to uncertain) - presumably to maintain their pre-existing sense of meaning. Implications for the study of counterfactual thinking and meaning are discussed.

Psychological momentum (PM) is thought to be a force that influences judgment, emotion, and performance. Based on a review of the extant literature, we elucidate two distinct approaches that researchers have adopted in their study of PM: the input-centered approach and the output-centered approach. Consistent with the input-centered approach, we conceptualize PM as a process whereby temporal and contextual PM-like stimuli (i.e., perceptual velocity, perceptual mass, perceptual historicity, and perceptually interconnected timescales)initially perceived as an impetusare extrapolated to imagined future outcomes through mental simulation. In turn, and consistent with the output-centered approach, we posit that mental simulation elicits experiential (e.g., perceptual, cognitive, emotional) and behavioral states that govern goal pursuit, and that the pursuit of goals further influences perceptions of self, environment, and action quality. In all, we suggest that PM is interdependently linked to perceptions and behaviors in the sense that PM both influences and is influenced by changes in self-perceptions, environmental perceptions, and behavior, and we conclude by linking the PM construct to recent work on prospection.

The present study examined the influence of momentum sequence (positive vs. negative) and environmental climate (hot-wet vs. neutral) on supporters' (i.e. virtual observers') reported levels of perceived psychological momentum (PM) during a simulated cycling competition. Participants supported one of two competing cyclists involved in a race that was displayed on a screen in a lecture hall. The race scenario was manipulated so that the supported cyclist appeared to undergo either a positive or negative momentum sequence. In addition, participants were either exposed to a hot-wet environmental climate or to a neutral environmental climate while observing the race scenario. According to the results, reported levels of PM were higher in the positive momentum sequence condition than in the negative momentum sequence condition, consistent with the notion that supporters' PM is influenced by a positivity bias, and reported levels of PM were also found to be higher in the hot-wet climate condition than in the neutral climate condition, consistent with the notion that environmental climate is a contextual factor that influences PM through the operation of a causal augmenting mechanism.

The present study compared virtual actors' and observers' perceptions of positive and negative psychological momentum (PM) and their responses to sudden interruptions of momentum. Participants with experience playing competitive table tennis imagined that they were playing a table tennis game (virtual actors), whereas participants who lacked experience playing competitive table tennis imagined that they were observing a table tennis game (observers). While viewing an audiovisual simulation of a table tennis match, participants were exposed to either an ascending (i.e., positive momentum) or descending (i.e., negative momentum) scoring sequence that was either suddenly interrupted or not interrupted at all. Participants' PM perceptions were measured at the conclusion of the simulation. Results indicated that observers' PM perceptions were lower than were virtual actors' following the negative momentum sequence. More generally, interrupting positive momentum lowered PM perceptions, whereas interrupting negative momentum increased PM perceptions. Implications for the study of PM in sport are discussed.

Building on findings that self-uncertainty motivates attempts to restore certainty about the self, particularly in ways that highlight one’s distinctiveness from others, we show that self-uncertainty, relative to uncertainty in general, increases creative generation among individualists. In Studies 1 to 3, high (but not low) individualists performed better on a creative generation task after being primed with self-uncertainty as opposed to general uncertainty. In Study 4, this effect emerged only among those who were told that the task measured creative as opposed to analytical thinking, suggesting that the positive effects of self-uncertainty on performance are specific to tasks that bolster perceptions of uniqueness. In Study 5, self-uncertain individualists experienced a restoration of self-clarity after being induced to think about themselves as more (vs. less) creative. Implications for compensatory responses to self-uncertainty and factors that influence creativity are discussed.

Mental simulation refers to the imagination of alternative, counterfactual realities. This chapter provides an overview of research on simulations of the past— retrospective simulation—and simulations of the future— prospective simulation. Two major themes run throughout. The first is that both retrospective and prospective thinking are inextricably linked, relying on a mixture of episodic and semantic memories that share common neural substrates. The second is that retrospective and prospective simulation present trade-offs for the individual. On the one hand, they are functional, identifying causal inferences and potential obstacles that prepare us to try harder and perform better in the future. On the other hand, they sometimes produce bias—retrospective thinking can enhance hindsight bias, whereas prospective thinking can evoke biased predictions about the likelihood of certain events as well how one is going to feel about those events in the future. Fortunately, however, these biases can be diminished with debiasing techniques.