Peter Salovey

Experimental research has demonstrated that a stress-is-enhancing mindset can be induced and can improve outcomes by presenting information on the enhancing nature of stress. However, experimental evidence, media portrayals, and personal experience about the debilitating nature of stress may challenge this mindset. Thus, the traditional approach of focusing on the more “desired” mindset without arming participants against encounters with the less desired mindsets may not be sustainable in the face of conflicting information. How might this limitation be resolved? Here, we present three randomized-controlled interventions that test the efficacy of a “metacognitive approach.” In this approach, participants are given more balanced information about the nature of stress along with metacognitive information on the power of their mindsets aimed at empowering them to choose a more adaptive mindset even in …

This study aimed to contribute towards understanding the extent to which the emotional intelligence (EI), measured as an ability, of biological mothers and fathers was associated with the global EI of their offspring as young adults using a performance test of ability EI: the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). These questions were assessed using a cross-sectional sample (total N = 333), which was composed of 111 biological parents (111 mothers and 111 fathers) aged between 37 and 73 years (M = 51.26; SD = 5.91), and 111 offspring (54 men and 57 women) aged between 18 and 45 years (M = 22.56; SD = 3.26). There is an intergenerational gap between parents and offspring, with offspring having higher scores in EI than their fathers and mothers. The EI of parents was associated with that of their offspring, although the link with maternal EI was greater than the link …

This chapter discusses how mood influences the appraisal of physical symptoms and judgments about health and illness. After describing some recent experiments demonstrating the systematic effects of mood on the experience of physical symptoms and health beliefs, it describes mechanisms that might explain the associations between mood and health-related judgments. The chapter provides a discussion of the implications of this work for discovering biases in health survey data and understanding hypochondriasis. The random assignment of subjects to mood inductions allows for a direct test of the hypothesis that mood shifts have consequences for health-related cognitions. The chapter argues that the mood effects might be explained by three (not mutually exclusive) mechanisms, mood-congruent recall, mood-induced shifts in attentional focus, and actual changes in the functioning of the immune system …