Striving for Consistency Shapes Emotional Responses to Other’s Outcomes

• Authors: Agnieszka Pietraszkiewicz , Bogdan Wojciszke
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Based on the balance theory (Heider, 1958), we hypothesized that emotions (i.e., schadenfreude, resentment, joy and sorrow) induced by other person’s outcomes function as responses restoring balance within cognitive units consisting of the perceiver, other persons and their outcomes. As a consequence, emotional reactions towards others’ outcomes depend on the perceiver’s attitudes in such a way that outcomes of a well-liked person rise congruous responses (sorrow after failure and joy after success), while outcomes of a disliked other lead to incongruous responses (schadenfreude after failure and resentment after success). Our participants recalled a situation from their past in which somebody they liked or disliked had succeed or failed. Additionally, we manipulated whether the outcome referred to a domain where participants’ self-interest was involved or not. We analyzed the participants’ average emotional state as well as specific emotions induced by the recalled events. Consistently with expectations we found that balancing principles played a major role in shaping emotional responses to successes and failures of person who were well-liked or disliked.

Keywords

EN

Balance; Schadenfreude; Resentment; Self-interest; Self-esteem

• Publisher: Committee for Psychological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Polish Psychological Bulletin
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 296-305

Dates

published

2014-09-01

online

2014-09-09

Contributors

author

Agnieszka Pietraszkiewicz

• University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Polna St. 16/20, 81-745 Sopot, Poland;

author

Bogdan Wojciszke

• University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sopot Campus, Poland

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/ppb-2014-0036