1. Feeling bad about being sad: the role of social expectancies in amplifying negative mood
- Author
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Matthew J. Hornsey, Joonha Park, Peter Kuppens, Peter Koval, Brock Bastian, and Yukiko Uchida
- Subjects
Self-assessment ,Adult ,Cross-Cultural Comparison ,Male ,Self-Assessment ,social appraisal ,expectancies ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Emotions ,sad ,emotion norms ,Personal Satisfaction ,Anger ,Affect (psychology) ,White People ,Developmental psychology ,Young Adult ,Asian People ,Japan ,Perception ,Surveys and Questionnaires ,Humans ,negative mood ,General Psychology ,media_common ,Social perception ,Depression ,Australia ,Cross-cultural studies ,culture ,Sadness ,Affect ,Feeling ,Social Perception ,Female ,Psychology ,Social psychology ,ruminative self-focus - Abstract
Our perception of how others expect us to feel has significant implications for our emotional functioning. Across 4 studies the authors demonstrate that when people think others expect them not to feel negative emotions (i.e., sadness) they experience more negative emotion and reduced well-being. The authors show that perceived social expectancies predict these differences in emotion and well-being both more consistently than-and independently of-personal expectancies and that they do so by promoting negative self-evaluation when experiencing negative emotion. We find evidence for these effects within Australia (Studies 1 and 2) as well as Japan (Study 2), although the effects of social expectancies are especially evident in the former (Studies 1 and 2). We also find experimental evidence for the causal role of social expectancies in negative emotional responses to negative emotional events (Studies 3 and 4). In short, when people perceive that others think they should feel happy, and not sad, this leads them to feel sad more frequently and intensely.
- Published
- 2011