The COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the greatest modern societal challenges that requires widespread collective action and cooperation. While a handful of actions can help reduce pathogen transmission, one critical behavior is to self-isolate. Public health messages often use persuasive language to change attitudes and behaviors, which can evoke a wide range of negative and positive emotional responses. In a U.S. representative sample ( N = 955), we presented two messages that leveraged either threatening or prosocial persuasive language, and measured self-reported emotional reactions and willingness to self-isolate. Although emotional responses to the interventions were highly heterogeneous, personality traits known to be linked with distinct emotional experiences (extraversion and neuroticism) explained significant variance in the arousal response. While results show that both types of appeals increased willingness to self-isolate (Cohen's d = 0.41), compared to the threat message, the efficacy of the prosocial message was more dependent on the magnitude of the evoked emotional response on both arousal and valence dimensions. Together, these results imply that prosocial appeals have the potential to be associated with greater compliance if they evoke highly positive emotional responses.

Recent research reveals that people's preferences, choices, and judgments are affected by whether information is presented in a foreign or a native language. Here, we review this evidence focusing on various decision-making domains and advancing a variety of potential explanations for this foreign language effect on decision-making. We interpret the findings in the context of dual-system theories of decision-making, entertaining the possibility that foreign language processing reduces the impact of intuition and/or increases the impact of deliberation on people's choices. In closing, we suggest future directions to progress in our understanding of how language and decision-making interact when guiding people's decisions.

The COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the greatest modern societal challenges that requires widespread collective action and cooperation. While a handful of actions can help reduce pathogen transmission, one critical behavior is to self-isolate. Public health messages often use persuasive language to change attitudes and behaviors, which can evoke a wide range of negative and positive emotional responses. In a U.S. representative sample (N = 955), we presented two messages that leveraged either threatening or prosocial persuasive language, and measured self-reported emotional reactions and willingness to self-isolate. Although emotional responses to the interventions were highly heterogeneous, personality traits known to be linked with distinct emotional experiences (extraversion and neuroticism) explained significant variance in the arousal response. While results show that both types of appeals increased willingness to self-isolate (Cohen’s d = .41), compared to the threat message, the efficacy of the prosocial message was more dependent on the magnitude of the evoked emotional response on both arousal and valence dimensions. Together, these results imply that prosocial appeals have the potential to be associated with greater compliance if they evoke highly positive emotional responses.

Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of human life that can be fractioned into two distinct psychological constructs: risk (known probabilistic outcomes) and ambiguity (unknown probabilistic outcomes). Although risk and ambiguity are known to powerfully bias nonsocial decision-making, their influence on prosocial behavior remains largely unexplored. Here we show that ambiguity attitudes, but not risk attitudes, predict prosocial behavior: the greater an individual’s ambiguity tolerance, the more they engage in costly prosocial behaviors, both during decisions to cooperate (experiments 1 and 3) and choices to trust (experiment 2). Once the ambiguity associated with another’s actions is sufficiently resolved, this relationship between ambiguity tolerance and prosocial choice is eliminated (experiment 3). Taken together, these results provide converging evidence that attitudes toward ambiguity are a robust predictor of one’s willingness to engage in costly social behavior, which suggests a mechanism for the underlying motivations of prosocial action.

Language context (native vs. foreign) affects people’s choices and preferences in a wide variety of situations. However, emotional reactions are a key component driving people’s choices in those situations. In six studies, we test whether foreign language context modifies biases and the use of heuristics not directly caused by emotional reactions. We fail to find evidence that foreign language context modifies the extent to which people suffer from outcome bias (Experiment 1a & 1b) and the use of the representativeness heuristic (Experiment 2a & 2b). Furthermore, foreign language context does not modulate decision-making in those scenarios even when emotion is brought into the context (Experiment 1c & 2c). Foreign language context shapes decision-making, but the scope of its effects might be limited to decision-making tendencies in which emotion plays a causal role.

Fear and anxiety about COVID-19 have swept across the globe. Understanding the factors that contribute to increased emotional distress regarding the pandemic is paramount—especially as experts warn about rising cases. Despite large amounts of data, it remains unclear which variables are essential for predicting who will be most affected by the distress of future waves. We collected cross-sectional data on a multitude of socio-psychological variables from a sample of 948 United States participants during the early stages of the pandemic. Using a cross-validated hybrid stepwise procedure, we developed a descriptive model of COVID-19 emotional distress. Results reveal that trait anxiety, gender, and social (but not government) media consumption were the strongest predictors of increasing emotional distress. In contrast, commonly associated variables, such as age and political ideology, exhibited much less unique explanatory power. Together, these results can help public health officials identify which populations will be especially vulnerable to experiencing COVID-19-related emotional distress.

When people use a foreign language, they systematically make different choices than when they use their native tongue (e.g., Costa et al., 2014; Keysar, Hayakawa, & An, 2012). The impact of a foreign language is most pronounced in the context of moral judgements. When faced with a moral dilemma, people tend to choose utilitarian options much more often when using a foreign language than their native language (e.g.

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