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Affect variability is related to immune response to an influenza vaccination and, in some cases, interacts with mean levels of affect. These oscillations in affective experiences are critical to consider in order to unpack the intricacies of how affect influences health. These findings suggest that future researchers should consider the important role of affect variability on physical health-relevant outcomes as well as examine the moderating effect of mean affect levels.

Although the literature that connects positive affect (PA) to health has exploded over the last 20 years, the approach to studying this topic has remained simplistic. Specifically, researchers overwhelmingly rely on the principle that all PA is healthful, all of the time. Here, we review recent studies indicating that a more nuanced approach is valuable. In particular, we demonstrate that a more thoughtful approach to factors such as arousal, culture, timing, and measurement type results in a more complex picture of when PA is helpful and when it is not. Taking these issues into account also has implications for the types of mechanisms underlying these associations, as well as how other moderators might operate. Thus, we argue that considering these gradations will allow researchers to develop successful and theoretically based health interventions, untangle mixed findings, and enable a deeper understanding of the connection between PA and health.

How people remember feeling in the past informs future decisions; however, memory for past emotion is subject to a number of biases. Previous research on choice blindness has shown that people often fail to notice when they are exposed to misinformation about their own decisions, preferences, and memories. This type of misinformation can influence how they later remember past events. In the present study, we examined the memory blindness effect in a new domain: memory for pain. Participants (N = 269) underwent a cold-pressor task and rated how much pain, distress, and positive and negative affect they had experienced. Later, participants were shown their pain ratings and asked to explain them. Some of the participants were shown lower pain ratings than they had actually made. In a second session, participants recalled how painful the task had been and how much distress and positive and negative affect they remembered experiencing. The results indicated that the majority of participants who were exposed to misinformation failed to detect the manipulation, and subsequently remembered the task as being less painful. The participants in the misinformation condition were not overall more willing to repeat the study tasks, but the participants who recalled less distress, less negative affect, and more positive affect were more willing to repeat the study tasks again in a future experiment. These results demonstrate the malleability of memory for painful experiences and that willingness to repeat aversive experiences may depend more on memory for affective reactions to the original experience than on memory for the physical pain itself.

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