The outbreak of the COVID-19 has brought upon unprecedented challenges to nearly all people around the globe. Yet, people may differ in their risks of social, economic, and health well-being. In this research, we take a gender-difference approach to examine whether and why women suffered greater emotional and life distress than men at the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Using a large nationwide Chinese sample, we found that compared to men, women reported higher levels of anxiety and fear, as well as greater life disturbance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, that women suffered more was partly explained by their higher level of pathogen disgust sensitivity. Our findings highlight the important consequences of gender differences in response to the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggest that policymakers pay more attention to gender inequalities regarding COVID-19 responses.

How attachment style affects emotion processing is tightly connected with individuals’ attention bias. This experiment explored avoidant individuals’ attentional engagement and attentional disengagement using a cue-target paradigm in fMRI. The experimental group consisted of 17 avoidant participants, while the control group consisted of 16 secure participants; these were identified by the Experiences in Close Relationships inventory and the Relationship Questionnaire. Each reacted to pictures of positive parent-child attachment, negative parent-child attachment, positive romantic attachment, negative romantic attachment, and neutral non-attachment. Behaviorally, avoidant individuals were slower than secure individuals in responding to emotions and their attentional disengagement effect for negative parent-child emotions was stronger than positive ones. fMRI results showed that avoidant compared to secure individuals activated more strongly in the right superior temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, and the left medial frontal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, supplementary motor area, and cingulate gyrus. They also showed stronger activation in disengaging from positive than negative emotions in the bilateral fusiform and middle occipital gyri. In conclusion, avoidant individuals could detect emotions as effective as secure individuals in attentioal engaging stages. They can disengage from positive emotions with effective cognitive resources and were harder to get rid of negative emotions with insufficient resource.

Drawing upon the theories of conceptual metaphors and embodiment, in the present study we systematically examined the metaphorical link between spicy tastes and anger. In terms of personality, the results showed that participants presumed strangers who liked spicy foods (e.g., chili peppers) were more easily angered (Experiment 1). In addition, we found that people who are higher in trait anger are more likely to have a spicy food preference (Experiment 2). The findings support a metaphorical mapping between taste and personality processes.

In previous studies of the Ultimatum Game (UG), it has been found that proposers do not maximize self-interest by making extremely unfair offers, but instead make relatively fair offers. The main issue is whether or not the proposer's fair behavior is motivated by fear of rejection or by a concern for fairness. We, therefore, conducted this study to examine the impact on the proposer's decision in the UG when information was obtained about the responder's minimum acceptable offer (MAO). The results show that a high percentage of the proposer's offers were close to the MAO, indicating that fear of rejection, rather than concern for fairness, accounted for the proposer's positive offer. We also found that Machiavellian personality traits played an important role in the proposer's offering behavior. This indicated that fear of rejection may be more prominently displayed by people scoring highly in Machiavellianism.