Social support is critical for psychological and physical well-being, reflecting the centrality of belong-ingness in our lives. Human interactions often provide people with considerable social support, but can pets also fulfill one's social needs? Although there is correlational evidence that pets may help individuals facing significant life stressors, little is known about the well-being benefits of pets for everyday people. Study 1 found in a community sample that pet owners fared better on several well-being (e.g., greater self-esteem, more exercise) and individual-difference (e.g., greater conscientiousness, less fearful attachment) measures. Study 2 assessed a different community sample and found that owners enjoyed better well-being when their pets fulfilled social needs better, and the support that pets provided complemented rather than competed with human sources. Finally, Study 3 brought pet owners into the laboratory and experimentally demonstrated the ability of pets to stave off negativity caused by social rejection. In summary, pets can serve as important sources of social support, providing many positive psychological and physical benefits for their owners.

Social support is critical for psychological and physical well-being, reflecting the centrality of belongingness in our lives. Human interactions often provide people with considerable social support, but can pets also fulfill one's social needs? Although there is correlational evidence that pets may help individuals facing significant life stressors, little is known about the well-being benefits of pets for everyday people. Study 1 found in a community sample that pet owners fared better on several well-being (e.g., greater self-esteem, more exercise) and individual-difference (e.g., greater conscientiousness, less fearful attachment) measures. Study 2 assessed a different community sample and found that owners enjoyed better well-being when their pets fulfilled social needs better, and the support that pets provided complemented rather than competed with human sources. Finally, Study 3 brought pet owners into the laboratory and experimentally demonstrated the ability of pets to stave off negativity caused by social rejection. In summary, pets can serve as important sources of social support, providing many positive psychological and physical benefits for their owners.

What is the self? This age-old question is one that, surprisingly, receives little attention even among researchers who study it. In our view, addressing this important question begins with acknowledging that the self is composed of multiple, context-dependent self-aspects represented in an interrelated memory network. These self-aspects develop in the service of pursuing important self-relevant goals (e.g., reproduction, achievement, belongingness) and re ect one's important qualities exhibited in these domains. Because context activates a goal-relevant self-aspect, discrete subregions of self-knowledge are activated at any given time, which limits the impact of core personality attributes and shapes the experience of current affect. This approach has broader implications for explaining how the self can be both stable yet variable, for the conditions under which self-concepts develop and change, for distinguishing between the self as the known and the knower, and for goal pursuit and self-regulatory activities.

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What happens when our automatic evaluations conflict with our attitudes that we can reflect on and articulate? In this paper, we review some processes by which explicit implicit evaluative discrepancies (EIEDs) arise and can impact our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, using a dual-systems perspective on attitudes to explain the psychological processes underlying these evaluative inconsistencies. EIEDs emerge when differential positive and negative evaluations toward attitude objects reside in systems of knowledge governed by language and reasoning (i.e., explicit evaluations) and systems of knowledge that are association-based (i.e., implicit evaluations). We discuss factors that produce EIEDs, including the influence of extrapersonal associations on attitudes, temporal, and qualitative differences in encountering attitude-relevant information, and the differential influence of processing goals. Finally, we discuss consequences of holding EIEDs, including their impact on behaviors toward attitude objects, enhanced elaboration and scrutiny of social information, motivated reasoning, errant affective forecasting, and self-regulatory success and failure.