Coronashaming: interpersonal affect worsening in contexts of COVID-19 rule violations

The link between cognitive and affective empathy and interpersonal emotion regulation direction and strategies

Interpersonal emotion regulation (ER) refers to the different processes aimed at changing the emotional states of others. Some authors have speculated about the pivotal role of empathy for interpersonal ER to happen. However, the very limited empirical evidence suggests that only cognitive empathy as opposed to affective empathy may be a necessary antecedent. As previous research only considered interpersonal affect improvement and showed mixed evidence for the regulation strategies, we aimed to address this gap in the current research. To that aim, 374 adults (M = 30.3 years, 249 female) reported their tendency to engage in cognitive (perspective-taking) and affective empathy (empathic concern and personal distress) as well as their tendency to improve and worsen others' mood, and to use different regulation strategies (situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change, and modulation of the emotional response) to change others' feelings. Results of the regression analyses showed that while affect improvement was not significantly predicted by any of the empathy variables, affect worsening was positively predicted by personal distress. Concerning the regulation strategies, while cognitive change and situation modification were positively predicted by personal distress, attention deployment was positively predicted by perspective-taking. Overall, the obtained results highlight the need to further investigate the link between empathy and ER and to carefully consider the methods selected for that purpose.

Coping with COVID-19: Insights from cognition and emotion research

Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing efforts to contain its spread have caused major problems with public health, along with social and economic disruptions. This Special Issue addresses how coping with the pandemic has been shaped by the interplay between cognition and emotion. The various contributions to this Special Issue explore the impacts of the pandemic on: (a) How people were confronted with new risks and realities; (b) Active processes of emotional resilience and ruminative coping; and c) Moral decision-making. Taken together, this work shows how research on cognition and emotion can illuminate the social and emotional strains of the pandemic, while helping to identify risk factors that exacerbate these problems and pointing to ways to successfully address and mitigate these problems, such as emotion regulation, social support, and perspective taking. The editorial closes by briefly reporting on the present state of the journal and changes in the editorial team.