Emotional Experiences and Psychological Well-Being in 51 Countries During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic presents challenges to psychological well-being, but how can we predict when people suffer or cope during sustained stress? Here, we test the prediction that specific types of momentary emotional experiences are differently linked to psychological well-being during the pandemic. Study 1 used survey data collected from 24,221 participants in 51 countries during the COVID-19 outbreak. We show that, across countries, well-being is linked to individuals' recent emotional experiences, including calm, hope, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness. Consistent results are found in two age, sex, and ethnicity-representative samples in the United Kingdom (n = 971) and the United States (n = 961) with preregistered analyses (Study 2). A prospective 30-day daily diary study conducted in the United Kingdom (n = 110) confirms the key role of these five emotions and demonstrates that emotional experiences precede changes in well-being (Study 3). Our findings highlight differential relationships between specific types of momentary emotional experiences and well-being and point to the cultivation of calm and hope as candidate routes for well-being interventions during periods of sustained stress. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).</p

On contracting graphs to fixed pattern graphs.

For a fixed graph H, the H-Contractibility problem asks if a graph is H-contractible, i.e., can be transformed into H via a series of edge contractions. The computational complexity classification of this problem is still open. So far, H has a dominating vertex in all cases known to be polynomially solvable, whereas H does not have such a vertex in all cases known to be NP-complete. Here, we present a class of graphs H with a dominating vertex for which H-Contractibility is NP-complete. We also present a new class of graphs H for which H-Contractibility is polynomially solvable. Furthermore, we study the (H,v)-Contractibility problem, where v is a vertex of H. The input of this problem is a graph G and an integer k. The question is whether G is H-contractible such that the “bag” of G corresponding to v contains at least k vertices. We show that this problem is NP-complete whenever H is connected and v is not a dominating vertex of H