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While negative emotions are associated with risk behaviors and risk avoidance among people with HIV, emerging evidence indicates that negative self-conscious emotions, those evoked by self-reflection or self-evaluation (e.g., shame, guilt, and embarrassment), may differentially influence health-risk behaviors by producing avoidance or, conversely, pro-social behaviors. Positive emotions are associated with beneficial health behaviors, and may account for inconsistent findings related to negative self-conscious emotions. Using multinomial logistic regression, we tested whether positive emotion moderated the relationships between negative emotion and negative self-conscious emotions and level of condomless sex risk: (1) seroconcordant; (2) serodiscordant with undetectable viral load; and (3) serodiscordant with detectable viral load [potentially amplified transmission (PAT)] among people recently diagnosed with HIV (n = 276). While positive emotion did not moderate the relationship between negative emotion and condomless sex, it did moderate the relationship between negative self-conscious emotion and PAT (AOR = 0.60; 95% CI 0.41, 0.87); high negative self-conscious and high positive emotion were associated with lower PAT risk. Acknowledgment of both positive and negative self-conscious emotion may reduce transmission risk behavior among people with HIV.

Aberrant psychological and behavioral symptoms are common in patients with dementia. These symptoms have negative consequences for family caregivers, causing stress and burden. Erontotemporal dementia (ETD) symptoms cause more pronounced stress and burden on caregivers than those associated with Alzheimer dementia. In this randomized, attention control pilot study, we delivered 5-weekly, one-on-one, positive affect intervention sessions to family caregivers of people with ETD. The program. Life Enhancing Activities for Family Caregivers: LEAF was conducted in-person or by vidéoconférence with caregivers across the United States. Measures of affect, caregiver mood, stress, distress, and caregiver burden were assessed at baseline, end of sessions, and 1 month after completion. Twenty-four caregivers (12 intervention and 12 attention control) participated. At the end of the intervention, scores on positive affect, negative affect, burden, and stress all improved in the intervention compared with the control group. These scores continued to show improvement at the assessment done 1 month after intervention. Subjects were receptive to the skills and the delivery methods. The positive emotion skill-building intervention proved feasible especially in the internet vidéoconférence delivery format. The intervention promoted positive affect and improved psychological outcomes for family caregivers of people with ETD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study was to explore the associations among benefit finding, daily positive and negative emotion, and daily cortisol slope in 71 maternal caregivers. Benefit finding was measured using the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI; Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress , 9 , 455–472.). Cortisol slope was not significantly correlated with any of the PTGI subscales, positive emotion, or negative emotion. However, the interactions of daily positive emotion with the PTGI subscales of Personal Strength, Appreciation of Life, and Spiritual Change were statistically significant such that higher scores on these subscales predicted a steeper (more adaptive) daily cortisol slope only for those women who also had higher levels of daily positive emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coping, defined as the thoughts and behaviors used to manage the internal and external demands of situations that are appraised as stressful, has been a focus of research in the social sciences for more than three decades. The dramatic proliferation of coping research has spawned healthy debate and criticism and offered insight into the question of why some individuals fare better than others do when encountering stress in their lives. We briefly review the history of contemporary coping research with adults. We discuss three primary challenges for coping researchers (measurement, nomenclature, and effectiveness), and highlight recent developments in coping theory and research that hold promise for the field, including previously unaddressed aspects of coping, new measurement approaches, and focus on positive affective outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]