Publications

Dr. Laura Kubzansky’s publications can be found on Google Scholar, PubMed, and ResearchGate.

View a list of Dr. Kubzansky’s selected works.

Interview – The positive health effects of prosocial behaviors

Click here to read a recent interview given in response to her opinion piece in Nature Human Behavior, “Prosociality should be a public health priority.”

Affective Science: Special Issue on Interventions to Modify Psychological Well-Being

Individuals as well as healthcare systems, employers, school districts, and governments are increasingly interested in initiatives that can improve the psychological well-being of the people they serve and the people within their organizations. However, many knowledge gaps undermine our research community’s ability to meet these growing requests for tools that can improve psychological well-being in meaningful, durable, and scalable ways.

The goal of this special issue is to showcase novel empirical evidence examining interventions that can modify psychological well-being, particularly those that have the potential to be scaled at the population level. We are interested in key aspects of how these interventions play out, but particularly welcome papers that speak to the theme of “What Works, What Doesn’t Work, and an Agenda for Future Research.”

Around this theme we included papers that address: meaningful effect sizes, durability and scalability of interventions, efficacy across diverse populations and settings, effective modes of delivery, mechanisms of effect, methodological innovations, brief-touch/micro interventions, and informative null effects. In addition, we included work that seeks to refine or develop conceptual models that specifically include or address why or how interventions are likely to be broadly effective. We define psychological well-being as overall positive state of one’s emotions, life satisfaction, sense of meaning and purpose, and ability to pursue self-defined goals (which others have referred to as emotional well-being: https://www.nccih.nih/gov/grants/concepts/consider/emotional-wellbeing-high-priority-research-networks.

Contributions come from multiple disciplines including – but not limited to- psychology (health, social, personality, biological, developmental, clinical, cultural, organizational & industrial, cognitive, etc.), public health (social & behavioral sciences, epidemiology, health policy, global health), neuroscience, communication science, economics, sociology, and computer science. At Affective Science, affective processes are broadly constructed, and include emotion, mood, stress, motivation, reward processes, and affective evaluations.

See the Special Issue here.