In this book review, we offer chapter-by-chapter review and general comments of Hadley Wickham’s (2016) ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Two examples of 2-way interaction plots were included to highlight the flexibility and power of the ggplot2 package in R.

Objectives: To determine whether a brief self-directed forgiveness workbook intervention could alter forgiveness, depression symptoms, and anxiety symptoms. Design: A multisite randomised waitlist-controlled trial was conducted among 4598 participants. Recruitment occurred from 11 February 2020 to 30 September 2021. Final follow-up occurred on 25 October 2021. Setting: Participants were recruited from community-based samples in sites in Colombia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Africa, and Ukraine. Participants: Individuals (n=7837) were screened for eligibility. For inclusion, participants needed to be ≥18 years and have experienced an interpersonal transgression. The analytic sample consisted of n=4598 participants, median age 26 and 73% female. Interventions: At each site, participants were randomly assigned to either immediate receipt of a self-directed forgiveness workbook intervention, or to receipt after a 2 week delay. Main outcomes measures: The primary outcomes were unforgiveness (Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory-18), depression symptoms, and anxiety symptoms (Brief Symptom Inventory-18) measured at 2 weeks following intervention assignment. Results: At 2 weeks follow-up, unforgiveness was lower among the immediate-treatment group compared with the delayed-treatment group (standardised mean difference=−0.53 (95% CI=−0.58 to –0.47)); similar patterns were found for depression (standardised mean difference=−0.22 (95% CI=−0.28 to –0.16)) and anxiety symptoms (standardised mean difference=−0.21 (95% CI=−0.27 to –0.15)). Conclusions: A brief workbook intervention promoted forgiveness and reduced depression and anxiety symptoms. The promotion of forgiveness with such workbooks has the potential for widespread dissemination to improve global mental health. Trial registration number: NCT04257773.

Research on the subjective experience of suffering has typically focussed on older clinical samples living in Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries. To further extend the existing body of empirical research on suffering to less WEIRD contexts, we use three waves of data (Wave 1: December 2020; Wave 2: January 2021; Wave 3: February 2021) from a sample of nonclinical Indonesian adults (n = 594) to examine associations between suffering, two indices of psychological distress, and 10 facets of well‐being. In our primary analysis, we estimated a series of multiple regression models that adjusted for a range of sociodemographic characteristics, financial and material stability, religious/spiritual factors, prior values of overall suffering, and prior values of each outcome assessed in Wave 1. Results indicated that overall suffering assessed in Wave 2 was associated with an increase in both indices of psychological distress and a decrease in eight facets of well‐being assessed in Wave 3. Using a similar analytic approach, results from a secondary analysis indicated that higher scores on both indices of psychological distress and lower scores on seven of the well‐being facets assessed in Wave 2 were associated with worse subsequent overall suffering assessed in Wave 3. These findings contribute to empirical literature on the implications of suffering for well‐being.

Few existing research has tested the effects of gratitude in risk decisions. The current study conducted four experiments with MTurk samples to test the primary hypothesis that gratitude promotes risk aversion in decision making. Results from Study 1 (N = 228) with a measure of dispositional gratitude and Study 2 (N = 125) by priming grateful experience showed that gratitude led to risk aversion, in particular, under gain framing. Study 3 (N = 126) offered an explanation by showing a partial mediation of present focus for the effect of gratitude on risk preference. Study 4 (N = 126) extended the finding to situations where people estimated others’ decisions and showed that gratitude led one to believe that others are risk averse in decision making. These results documented the cognitive benefit of gratitude in decision making and suggested a need to study how discrete emotions, such as gratitude, influence risk decisions.

Many studies have reported evidence suggesting that dispositional forgivingness has positive implications for different domains of well‐being. However, relatively few methodologically rigorous studies have been conducted in the Global South, particularly in post‐conflict settings where forgiveness could play an important role in supporting individual well‐being. In this three‐wave cohort study of predominantly young adult Colombians (n = 1575), we examined the associations of dispositional forgivingness with 20 well‐being outcomes across several domains of well‐being: psychological distress, psychological well‐being, physical health, social well‐being, and character strengths/virtues. Using an outcome‐wide analytic design that included extensive control for potential confounding and reverse causation by adjusting for a range of covariates assessed in Wave 1 (2017), we found that dispositional forgivingness assessed in Wave 2 (2018) was at least modestly associated with improvements in one or more facet of each well‐being domain assessed approximately 1 year later in Wave 3 (2019). Associations tended to be stronger for outcomes in the domains of psychological distress, psychological well‐being, social well‐being, and character strengths/virtues compared to the physical health domain. These longitudinal findings suggest that dispositional forgivingness might promote individual well‐being in societies with a long history of ongoing civil unrest, conflict, and war.