Using Social Media to Assess State and Trait Emotional intersections during the Longest-lasting Lunar Eclipse of the Twenty-first Century: A Pilot Study

A lunar eclipse is an extraordinary natural event and a potential elicitor of complex emotional experiences. Preliminary scientific evidence investigated the impacts of the moon on human behavior, but without deepen its effects on emotions, which are essential to understand our cognitive evaluations and actions. Here, we tested whether specific dispositional emotions and emotional regulation strategies can be predictive of specific discrete state emotions including awe, anxiety, general positive and negative affect lived by participants during the Total Lunar eclipse (TLE) occurred in July 2018. 401 participants compiled validated questionnaires measuring state and dispositional emotions and affect: Awe-experience Scale (Awe-S), the Dispositional Positive Emotions Scale (DPES), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) and the State-Traits Anxiety Inventory (STAI). DPES factors compassion, love, pride and awe, and ERQ factor reappraisal predicted state positive affect, state anxiety and awe. Negative affect was predicted only by the DPES factor compassion. Specifically, a higher predisposition to live pride and love predicted respectively lower state awe and anxiety, while higher levels of dispositional compassion and awe led to higher state awe and anxiety. Dispositional awe with a reappraisal strategy led to experience more intense state positive emotions, while dispositional compassion alone led to more state negative emotions during TLE. Therefore, it was the combination of dispositional emotions and regulation strategies that significantly impacted on contingent emotions lived during the lunar eclipse.