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Construal Level Theory distinguishes emotions with respect to the level of construal level involved in their elicitation and experience. High-level emotions are abstract as they involve schematic and decontextualized information related to an event. Low-level emotions are concrete as they involve context-specific mental representations of an event. High-level emotions are commonly conceptualized as those that encompass self-conscious and moral emotions like pride and shame, whereas low-level emotions are believed to encompass basic emotions like fear and anger. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that anger may be a more abstract emotion than what is assumed, at least compared to other basic emotions such as fear. Anger is a highly social emotion, characterized by the consideration of abstract universal and social rules and principles. To date, no study has investigated how anger differs from other basic emotions with respect to construal level. In three studies, participants wrote about a past or current event that made them feel most fearful or angry. Text analysis revealed that participants who wrote about an anger-eliciting event used significantly more abstract language.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated selfreported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = −0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

How do emotions influence speakers’ frame selection? Our preregistered experiment (N = 700; Prolific) revealed that dispositionally worried people preferred negative frames (e.g., 40% chance failure vs 60% chance success) to describe the predicted outcome of a decision. The opposite was found for dispositionally angry people, supporting an appraisal-tendency perspective.

An emerging and promising line of research has explored the role of emotion regulation in risky decision making (e.g., Heilman et al., 2010; Miu & Crisan, 2011; Panno et al., 2013), with a particular focus on the reappraisal strategy. However, reappraisal is a general strategy that encompasses various tactics. One such tactic is psychological distancing, which typically involves taking a distant perspective to see “the bigger picture”. Distance has been found to decrease emotional intensity (Van Boven et al., 2010), particularly the intensity of basic emotions such as fear and anger (Katzir & Eyal, 2013). In addition to its emotion regulatory benefits (e.g., White et al., 2019), psychological distance has been found to reduce probability weighting biases (Sun et al., 2018) and framing effects in risky decision problems (Raue et al., 2015). These effects are usually explained by a reduction in emotional intensity as distancing allows individuals to zoom out and transcend features of the here and now. The three studies presented here seek to contribute to this literature by examining how psychological distance moderates the influence of anger and fear on risk seeking. Three preregistered and well-powered studies (total N = 1,372; one correlational and two experimental) were conducted on mTurk using CloudResearch. mTurkers were able to participate if they had at least 95% approval rate, 500 HITs approved, and if they were currently residing in the US. Additional (preregistered) exclusion criteria were set for those who had completed the study (e.g., failed attention and bot checks, spent less than 2-3 minutes on the entire survey, indicated low English proficiency). The results indicated that the association between trait fear and risk aversion was reduced among individuals with high levels of habitual distancing (Study 1) and when participants imagined that the decision scenarios were temporally and physically distant (Study 2). Study 3 manipulated both emotions (anger vs. fear) and distancing (immersed vs distant). The results indicated that incidental distancing increased optimistic risk estimation.Taken together, these findings suggest that the impact of basic emotions like fear on risk can vary as a function of psychological distance. Such insight is of particular relevance to the field of judgment and decision making. Indeed, decision makers who engage in distancing might find themselves less influenced by incidental emotions. Additionally, decisions themselves may induce psychological distance when they involve temporally, physically, and socially distant targets. These findings also have important implications for organizations, especially now as leaders across the globe navigate the current pandemic.

Fear is an emotion that has interested scholars and practitioners across different domains, such as psychology, economics, and politics. It has been widely studied in domains like decision making under risk and uncertainty (Wake et al., 2020), and underlies well-known phenomena like loss aversion (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Ruggeri et al., 2020). While antecedents and outcomes of fear have been extensively studied, the construct itself has not received much empirical investigation. This is surprising given that researchers have made important conceptual distinctions between fear and other related emotions like anxiety. In this paper, I draw on Construal Level Theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2010) and the regulatory scope framework (Trope et al., 2021) to propose that fear and anxiety differ in their underlying level of construal and regulatory scope. Anxiety, unlike fear, constitutes a so-called “high-level construal” emotion because it broadens mental scope, directing attention towards more abstract and distant targets (Öhman, 2009; Trope & Liberman, 2010). The findings from this study may hold important implications for organizations, particularly those that frequently deal with crises. During the initial stages of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the virus was a distant and abstract threat to many countries. This distance may have reduced levels of fear that would otherwise have prompted earlier implementation of safety measures. Manipulating the construal level at which crisis scenarios are presented or processed can influence their effectiveness.

We performed an independent, direct, and better powered (N = 295) replication of Study 1, an experiment (N = 113) by Lammers, Stoker, and Stapel (2009). Lammers and colleagues distinguished between social power (influence over others) and personal power (freedom from the influence of others), and found support for their predictions that the two forms of power produce opposite effects on stereotyping, but parallel effects on behavioral approach. Our results did not replicate the effects on behavioral approach, but partially replicated the effects on stereotyping. Compared to personal power, social power produced less stereotyping, but neither form of power differed significantly from the control condition, and effect sizes were considerably lower than the original estimates. Potential explanations are discussed.