The past two months have been full for the HEART Lab, with moments of connection, media features, and major research progress.
At our recent lab gathering, we got to share the most delicious Indian food at Daddy Ji in Claremont. It gave us time to catch up and hear about the work our team has been diving into this semester. Our RA Catalina walked us through her fascinating thesis research on love attitudes in Spain, exploring how cultural context shapes the ways people express, interpret, and sustain romantic and nonromantic relationships. We also got to learn more about our RA Jaymes’ thesis examining daily well-being in young adults. Even though we attempted to step outside of our usual work mode, our RAs brought such interesting projects that conversation kept circling back to the HEART Lab’s favorite topics.
Fabiana, Dana, Jaymes, Dr. Heshmati, and Catalina
Speaking of work mode, The HEART Lab has been busy wrapping up several research projects. Dr. Saida Heshmati, along with our RAs Jaymes and Dana, got to celebrate completion of their bibliometric review paper–which applies a groundbreaking statistical approach to map the entire landscape of love research. The study uncovers historical patterns and identifies emerging frontiers in how love has been studied across psychology. It’s currently under review, but you can check out the preprint in the meantime.
We have also been deeply engaged in finalizing our manuscript for our mixed-method Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) study in Spain. We are excited to share our findings from the qualitative and quantitative data examining shared cultural conceptions of love in everyday life among people in Spain, and we will be submitting the manuscript for publication in the next month. In a different ongoing project, Dr. Heshmati has been collaborating with Dr. Mohammad Atari, a leading scientist who focuses on developing and using computational methods, particularly natural language processing (NLP), to conduct an innovative analysis of our qualitative data from Spain through Contextualized Construct Representations (CCR).
Beyond our internal projects, the past two months have brought exciting media attention to our research. Euronews featured an interview with our collaborator, Dr. Zita Oravecz, who discussed emerging evidence on the health benefits of everyday kindness. She explained how brief moments of shared positivity– what is known as positivity resonance (Fredrickson, 2013)– can spark measurable biological changes, including oxytocin release and reductions in stress hormones. The article also highlighted longitudinal findings showing that people who regularly engage in small acts of kindness experience even better long-term physical health outcomes (Kim et al., 2020; Macchia et al., 2023). Click here to read more of the Euronews article.
Additionally, Dr. Heshmati appeared in a CNN interview, alongside Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, both experts in the psychology of happiness and well-being, and weighed in on recent research assessing national “happiness threshold” needed to prevent risk of chronic illness in a country’s population (Luga et al., 2025). Informed by their own work on well-being and happiness, Dr. Heshmati and Dr. Lyubormisky highlight the importance of life satisfaction at the structural level: “a reflection of whether societies are providing those material, social, and psychological foundations for people to thrive.”
More updates to come as we prepare for our upcoming CCT project in Brazil!
Thank you <3
Kim, E. S., Whillans, A. V., Lee, M. T., Chen, Y., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2020). Volunteering and Subsequent Health and Well-Being in Older Adults: An Outcome-Wide Longitudinal Approach. American journal of preventive medicine, 59(2), 176–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.03.004
Macchia, L., Farmer, J., & Kubzansky, L. D. (2023). Prosocial behaviour helps to ease physical pain: Longitudinal evidence from Britain. Journal of psychosomatic research, 169, 111325. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2023.111325
