Abstract
During adolescence, peers take on increasing importance, while social skills are still developing. However, how emotions of peers influence social decisions during that age period is insufficiently known. We therefore examined the effects of three different emotional responses (anger, disappointment, happiness) on decisions about fairness in a sample of 156 adolescents aged 12–17 years. Participants received written emotional responses from peers in a version of the Dictator Game to a previous unfair offer. Adolescents reacted with more generous offers after disappointed reactions compared to angry and happy reactions. Furthermore, we found preliminary evidence for developmental differences over adolescence, since older adolescents differentiated more between the three emotions than younger adolescents. In addition, individual differences in social value orientation played a role in decisions after happy reactions of peers to a previous unfair offer, such that participants with a “proself” orientation made more unfair offers to happy peers than “prosocial” participants. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that adolescents take emotions of peers into account when making social decisions, while individual differences in social value orientation affect these decisions, and age seems to influence the nature of the reaction.
Highlights
Emotions play a pivotal role in social interactions, during adolescence, a life stage of significant social development (Blakemore, 2008)
Least significant difference (LSD) post hoc tests showed that participants chose the unfair option more often when dealing with angry recipients (M = 51%, SD = 33%, p < 0.001) or happy recipients (M = 53%, SD = 31%, p = 0.01) than when dealing with disappointed recipients (M = 43%, SD = 31%)
In other words, disappointed reactions of a peer to a previous unfair offer led to more generous offers than angry or happy reactions
Summary
Emotions play a pivotal role in social interactions, during adolescence, a life stage of significant social development (Blakemore, 2008). Emotions expressed by others affect the perceiver’s behavior in (further) interactions with the expresser (Parkinson, 1996; Van Kleef et al, 2010). These interpersonal effects of others’ emotions have not yet been studied in adolescence and are the focus of the current study. Expressed emotions – either facial, verbal, or postural – may trigger affective reactions and inferences about the other person that influence subsequent social interactions with this person (Van Kleef, 2009)
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