Jeanne L. Tsai's research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

Previous research demonstrates that the more people experience anger, fear, and other high arousal negative states (HAN) on average, the more prejudice and harm they express toward outgroups. Here we demonstrate that valuing HAN-above and beyond actually experiencing HAN-increases people's likelihood of engaging in harm toward cultural outgroups in everyday life. In Study 1, U.S. European Americans (N = 227) read hypothetical scenarios in which a member of another cultural group at school, work, or home made them uncomfortable. As predicted, the more participants ideally wanted to feel HAN, the more negatively they responded to the outgroup member in these scenarios (i.e., the more HAN they felt, the more they viewed harmful actions as appropriate, and the more likely they were to engage in these actions). To assess generalizability, in Study 2, we provide evidence from Canada (n = 162) and Taiwan (n = 170) that despite cultural differences in the valuation of specific types of HAN, wanting to feel HAN still predicted negative responses toward cultural outgroups in both cultures. These findings raise the intriguing possibility that reducing people's valuation of HAN might play an important role in increasing tolerance of cultural diversity in multicultural societies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Although social media plays an increasingly important role in communication around the world, social media research has primarily focused on Western users. Thus, little is known about how cultural values shape social media behavior. To examine how cultural affective values might influence social media use, we developed a new sentiment analysis tool that allowed us to compare the affective content of Twitter posts in the United States (55,867 tweets, 1,888 users) and Japan (63,863 tweets, 1,825 users). Consistent with their respective cultural affective values, U.S. users primarily produced positive (vs. negative) posts, whereas Japanese users primarily produced low (vs. high) arousal posts. Contrary to cultural affective values, however, U.S. users were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal negative (e.g., angry) posts, whereas Japanese were more influenced by changes in others' high arousal positive (e.g., excited) posts. These patterns held after controlling for differences in baseline exposure to affective content, and across different topics. Together, these results suggest that across cultures, while social media users primarily produce content that supports their affective values, they are more influenced by content that violates those values. These findings have implications for theories about which affective content spreads on social media, and for applications related to the optimal design and use of social media platforms around the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Over the last decade, researchers have increasingly demonstrated that ideal affect---the affective states that people value and ideally want to feel—shapes different aspects of daily life. Here I briefly review Affect Valuation Theory (AVT), which integrates ideal affect into existing models of affect and emotion by identifying the causes and consequences of variation in ideal affect. I then describe recent research that: (1) applies AVT to the valuation of negative states as well as more complex states, (2) examines how ideal affect shapes momentary affective experience, (3) suggests that ideal affect has both direct and indirect effects on health, and (4) illustrates that people's ideal affect shapes how they judge and respond to others. Finally, I discuss the implications of cultural and individual differences in ideal affect for clinical, educational, work, and leisure settings.

Why do people give to strangers? We propose that people trust and give more to those whose emotional expressions match how they ideally want to feel ("ideal affect match"). European Americans and Koreans played multiple trials of the Dictator Game with recipients who varied in emotional expression (excited, calm), race (White, Asian), and sex (male, female). Consistent with their culture's valued affect, European Americans trusted and gave more to excited than calm recipients, whereas Koreans trusted and gave more to calm than excited recipients. These findings held regardless of recipient race and sex. We then used fMRI to probe potential affective and mentalizing mechanisms. Increased activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc; associated with reward anticipation) predicted giving, as did decreased activity in the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ; associated with reduced belief prediction error). Ideal affect match decreased rTPJ activity, suggesting that people may trust and give more to strangers whom they perceive to share their affective values.