Emotional responses to violated expectations

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Emotional responses to violated expectations Nicholas Levy1* and Eddie Harmon-Jones1 1 University of New South Wales, Australia Aims: Many social psychological theories describe cognitively complex responses to psychological threats such as those in cognitive dissonance and mortality salience research. Some of these responses can be explained simply as palliative responses to negative emotional state induced by violated expectations. The aim of the present experiment was to demonstrate a negative emotional response to a simple expectancy violation. This would support the idea that a common mechanism can explain and unify disparate theories, and has not been directly measured until now. Method: The present experiment violated participants’ expectations with a cognitively simple manipulation: incongruent sentence endings. EMG Corrugator supercilii (brow) activity to the sentence endings, EEG event related potentials (ERPs) to emotional pictures presented after the sentences, and a questionnaire measured participants responses to sentence endings. Some participants held a fearful posture allowing examination of the effect of embodying negative affect on the negative emotional response to the expectancy violation. Results: Corrugator and questionnaire results together indicated a negative emotional response to the incongruent sentence endings. Posture did not significantly interact with the effect of the incongruent sentence endings. Conclusions: This study provides some support for unifying disparate theories under the common psychological mechanism of emotional responses to expectancy violations. Keywords: expectancy violation, EMG, ERPs (Event-Related Potentials), embodiment, dissonance Conference: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Wollongong, Australia, 20 Nov - 22 Nov, 2013. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Emotion Citation: Levy N and Harmon-Jones E (2013). Emotional responses to violated expectations. Conference Abstract: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.213.00031 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 24 Oct 2013; Published Online: 05 Nov 2013. * Correspondence: Mr. Nicholas Levy, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, z3287885@zmail.unsw.edu.au Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Nicholas Levy Eddie Harmon-Jones Google Nicholas Levy Eddie Harmon-Jones Google Scholar Nicholas Levy Eddie Harmon-Jones PubMed Nicholas Levy Eddie Harmon-Jones Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.