Self-focused Emotions Research Articles

The benefits of transformational leadership for addressing workplace emotions after COVID-19 at a large multi-campus university

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a series of challenges to organizations. Among those that successfully continued operating, the subsequent recovery period catalyzed pressure to redefine work structure after social distancing restrictions lifted. Here, we observed the benefits of transformational leadership in this historically unique context of organizational distress by applying an adjusted version of Ashkanasy and Dorris’s (Ashkanasy and Dorris in Annu Rev Organ Psych Organ Behav 4:67–90, 2017) framework for workplace emotions to a large, multi-campus university. We quantitatively content-analyzed semi-structured interviews of more than 300 divisional leaders and their staff from across the organization. Interviews occurred in the months following the first semester of continuous in-person service delivery, when most employees returned to working in employer-operated space. Despite disproportionate emphasis on negative and self-focused emotions, negative emotions clustered in individuals’ empathic recognition of others’ emotions; though efforts to regulate those emotions proved scant. Positive emotions primarily emerged in response to local leadership efforts to mitigate the negative emotions of students, staff, and faculty. This data pattern suggests that individuals experienced negative emotions, recognized others’ negative emotions, and appreciated leaders’ interventions to ameliorate those negative emotions. Strategies reminiscent of transformational leadership therefore productively addressed the negative impact of workplace stress imposed by the pandemic, helping to facilitate compliance and enthusiasm with return-to-work efforts. The findings thus illustrate how a transformational style of leadership can address individuals’ negative experiences during a period of pronounced existential stress.

Minimization, denial, moralization, and exaggeration: A taxonomy of backlash to transgender recognition and rights

Transgender people's efforts for recognition, rights, and equality face backlash, particularly as they gain societal visibility. However, backlash must appear justified (rather than merely prejudiced) to be legitimate and persuasive. I present a taxonomy of 17 backlash strategies people use against transgender groups, organized into four major themes: minimization, denial, moralization, and exaggeration. These strategies range from covert to overt and from seemingly benign to hostile. A model is proposed linking backlash strategies to behavioral tendencies via emotional responses. When targets are perceived as low in power and nonthreatening, people are more likely to favor minimization and denial; As targets are perceived as more threatening, people are more likely to favor moralization and exaggeration. Minimization and denial produce amusement and contempt or reduce or circumvent negative self-focused emotions (guilt or pity). This leads to the weakening of compassion and the suppression of prosocial behaviors. Moralization and exaggeration produce disgust, fear, and anger which can lead to avoidance, punishment, and aggression. By labeling and organizing the many ways that people push back against transgender groups, people may be better able to recognize and respond to backlash. I end by proposing several counter-backlash strategies suggested by the taxonomic structure.

It's no longer “me”: Low past-self-continuity reduces the sunk-cost bias

The sunk-cost bias describes the tendency to continue an inferior course of action because one has invested significant, irrecoverable resources in it in the past. It can lead individuals to make decisions that are suboptimal for their welfare. Across five experiments (N = 3197), we investigate whether the tendency of individuals to display sunk-cost bias is influenced by their sense of psychological connectedness to their past self that incurred the initial cost, or past-self-continuity. Studies 1–3 show evidence that individuals with low (versus high) past-self-continuity are less likely to display sunk-cost bias because they anticipate less negative feelings associated with abandoning substantial investments. Study 4, which was conducted under Registered Report format, provides partial support for this theory. We discuss potential complementary mechanisms, as well as implications of our findings for negative self-focused emotions and for decision biases routed in overweighting of or overcommitment to past actions.

Benefits Associated With Experiential and Material Purchases May Depend on Culture

Spending money on experiences, compared to materials, is often associated with more happiness. This experiential advantage, however, is developed based on samples from Western cultures. To investigate the boundaries of this effect, we studied participants from three divergent cultures (Iran, Malaysia, and the United States; N = 1,718) and examined the benefits associated with different purchase types across material–experiential and solitary–social dimensions. Results indicated a cross-culturally robust experiential advantage in terms of affiliative outcomes (i.e., positive other-focused emotions and relational enhancement), even when we accounted for the sociality of the purchases. However, the results were less consistent with the experiential advantage in terms of happiness and self-focused outcomes (i.e., self-focused emotions and self-elevation). Interestingly, experiential-solitary purchases were associated with stronger self-focused benefits among Iranians. We discuss possible explanations for this effect and offer recommendations for future research. Data and analysis code are publicly available at https://osf.io/n39gj/

Self-Focused Emotions and Ethical Decision-Making: Comparing the Effects of Regulated and Unregulated Guilt, Shame, and Embarrassment.

Research has examined various cognitive processes underlying ethical decision-making, and has recently begun to focus on the differential effects of specific emotions. The present study examines three self-focused moral emotions and their influence on ethical decision-making: guilt, shame, and embarrassment. Given the potential of these discrete emotions to exert positive or negative effects in decision-making contexts, we also examined their effects on ethical decisions after a cognitive reappraisal emotion regulation intervention. Participants in the study were presented with an ethical scenario and were induced, or not induced, to feel guilt, shame, or embarrassment, and were asked to reappraise, or not reappraise, the situation giving rise to those emotions. Responses to questions about the ethical case were evaluated for the quality of ethical sensemaking, perceptions of moral intensity, and decision ethicality. Findings indicate that guilt, shame, and embarrassment are associated with different sensemaking processes and metacognitive reasoning strategies, and resulted in different perceptions of moral intensity. Additionally, cognitive reappraisal had a negative impact on each of these factors. Implications of these findings for ethical decision-making research are discussed.

LOVE AND ATTACHMENT

Abstract It is not uncommon for philosophers to name disinterestedness, or some like feature, as an essential characteristic of love. Such theorists claim that in genuine love, one’s concern for her beloved must be noninstrumental, non-egocentric, or even selfless. These views prompt the question, "what, if any, positive role might self-interestedness play in genuine love?" In this paper, I argue that attachment, an attitude marked primarily by self-focused emotions and emotional predispositions, helps constitute the meaning and import of at least some kinds of adult reciprocal love. In this way, attachment represents a type of self-interestedness that not only contributes positively to such relationships but is also essential to them.

This Is How We Do It

“Necessary evils” require employees to psychologically or physically harm others to produce a perceived greater good. Employees can also help others during necessary evils tasks by providing assistance and support to those harmed. Through an inductive, qualitative study of human resources employees’ experiences carrying out downsizing, we explore how the perception of helping the person one has harmed relates to the harm-doer’s ability to withstand the challenges of having to carry out necessary evils. Our research culminates in a theoretical model showing that (a) seven kinds of stressors were associated with participants’ involvement in necessary evils tasks, (b) these stressors triggered a series of negative personal outcomes (negative self-focused emotions, emotional exhaustion, and intention to turnover), and (c) perceived prosocial impacts ameliorated these negative personal outcomes. We discuss the implications our findings for research and practice, address limitations of our study, and offer ideas for future research.

The “Empty Vessel” Physician

Although much research examines how physicians perceive their patients, here we study how patients perceive physicians. We propose patients consider their physicians like personally emotionless “empty vessels”: The higher is individuals’ need for care, the less they value physicians’ traits related to their personal lives (e.g., self-focused emotions), but the more they value physicians’ traits related to patients (e.g., patient-focused emotions). In an initial study, participants recalled fewer personal facts (e.g., marital status) about physicians who seemed more important to their health. In subsequent experiments, participants in higher need for care believed physicians have less personal emotions. Although higher need individuals, such as patients in a clinic, perceived their physicians to be personally emotionless, they wanted the clinic to hire physicians who displayed patient-focused emotion. We discuss implications of perceiving physicians as empty vessels for health care.

Processes of Emotion Communication and Control

Emotional expression and experience are dynamic processes that vary within and between individuals of different cultural groups ( Kitayama, Mesquita, & Karasawa, 2006 ). The present study sought to compare self-reports of processes related to emotion communication and control in India and the United States. A total of 268 participants (United States: n = 160 and India: n = 108) completed a self-report measure depicting hypothetical vignettes and a series of questions assessing likely emotions elicited, likelihood of expression, motives guiding expression and control, and method of expression. Results showed that US participants primarily reported more self-focused emotions (i.e., happiness) and self- and other-focused motives for expressing or controlling felt emotion, while Indian participants primarily reported emotions that focused on others’ well-being as well as other- and relationship-focused motives. US participants more commonly reported direct verbal communication of the emotion, while Indian participants more frequently reported implicit and contextual methods of communication.

The effect of relationship status on communicating emotions through touch

Research into emotional communication to date has largely focused on facial and vocal expressions. In contrast, recent studies by Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, and Jaskolka (2006) and Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, and Keltner (2009) exploring nonverbal communication of emotion discovered that people could identify anger, disgust, fear, gratitude, happiness, love, sadness and sympathy from the experience of being touched on either the arm or body by a stranger, without seeing the touch. The study showed that strangers were unable to communicate the self-focused emotions embarrassment, envy and pride, or the universal emotion surprise. Literature relating to touch indicates that the interpretation of a tactile experience is significantly influenced by the relationship between the touchers (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006). The present study compared the ability of romantic couples and strangers to communicate emotions solely via touch. Results showed that both strangers and romantic couples were able to communicate universal and prosocial emotions, whereas only romantic couples were able to communicate the self-focused emotions envy and pride.

Punitive versus compensatory reactions to injustice: Emotional antecedents to third-party interventions

The almost exclusive focus on punishment and inattention to compensatory alternatives in studies involving experimental games may yield patterns that do not accurately reflect how and when people respond to injustice, particularly if punishment and compensation are not psychologically equivalent approaches to justice restoration. In the current study, we examined participants' preference for punitive and compensatory actions, while also exploring emotional determinants and boundary conditions. Our results indicated that participants actually compensated victims more than they punished offenders and that the majority of participants assigned both. Furthermore, although both interventions were associated with emotional experiences of moral outrage toward the offender, self-focused emotions reflecting feelings of threat only predicted compensation and only when victims were aware that they had been victimized. These findings augment our understanding of third-party interventions, emphasizing the importance of considering response alternatives when studying the psychology of justice.

Relativistic origins of emotional reactions to events happening to others and to ourselves

The purpose of the present study was to show that people's emotional reactions to both good and bad events happening to others can be influenced by how their own experiences compare with these events. Female undergraduate students took a test of intellectual ability and received false feedback suggesting that they had done well or poorly. Later, they viewed written feedback apparently given to another participant suggesting that she had performed well or poorly. Finally, participants gave their emotional reactions to their own performance as well as the performance of the other participant. Results showed that participants' relative performance influenced how happy they felt for the high performing other participant and how sad they felt for the low performing other participant. Participants' self-focused emotions of pride and shame were also affected by the relative performance of the other participant.

Differentiating Embarrassment and Shame

Subjects sorted 56 descriptive statements into «shame» or «embarrassment» categories based on their own past experiences. Men and women agreed that shame was a more intense, enduring emotion than embarrassment, involving different responses and consequences. Whereas embarrassment resulted from surprising, relatively trivial accidents, shame occurred when foreseeable events revealed one's deep-seated flaws both to oneself and to others. Embarrassments engendered humor, smiles, and jokes, but shameful behavior caused disgust, anger, and apologies. The results argue that long-standing beliefs about the near equivalence of embarrassment and shame are unfounded