Four studies developed and validated two dictionaries to capture agentic and communal expressions in natural language. Their development followed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) approach (Study 1) and we tested their validity with frequency‐based analyses and semantic similarity measures. The newly developed Agency and Communion dictionaries were aligned with LIWC categories related to agency and communion (Study 2), and corresponded with subjective ratings (Study 3), confirming their convergent validity. Very low or absent correspondence between proposed dictionaries and unrelated LIWC categories demonstrated their discriminant validity (Study 2). Finally, we applied both dictionaries to language used in advertisements. In correspondence to gender stereotypes, male‐dominated jobs were advertised with more agentic than communal words, and female‐dominated jobs with more communal than agentic words (Study 4). Both dictionaries represent reliable tools for quantifying agentic and communal content in natural language, and will improve and facilitate future research on agency and communion.

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Based on Heider's (1958) balance theory we hypothesize that emotional responses to other persons' outcomes depend on attitudes towards these persons. Positive attitudes towards others lead to empathic responses to their outcomes-joy after a success and sorrow after a failure. Negative attitudes result in paradoxical responses -negative to a success (resentment) and positive to a failure (schadenfreude). These emotions function as responses restoring balance within cognitive units consisting of the perceiver, other persons and their outcomes. Three studies supported these hypotheses and showed that deservingness considerations play a weaker role in shaping emotional responses of joy and sorrow to others' outcomes when strong interpersonal attitudes are involved. However, deservingness plays an independent role in shaping the emotional response of resentment. Cognitive UnitsHumans are ultra-social beings. Whatever we do, we do it together with other people and so our thoughts and actions are deeply social in nature. The same is true of emotions, which in a broad sense are all social, though some of them are also social in a narrower sense as responses to other people and their outcomes. The present work is devoted to others' successes and failures as antecedents of global and specific affective responses.Basing on Heider (1958), we develop a balancing model of emotional responses to others' successes and failures and we review the deservingness model which is now the dominating account for these responses. We present two studies aimed at testing the balancing model and resolving discrepancies between the balancing and deservingness accounts of emotional responses to others' outcomes. Responses to Successes of Others: Joy and ResentmentIn individualistic societies, self-centered values are important (Oyserman & Lee, 2008) and people strive for successes in a variety of domains. Own success gives pleasure and a boost in self-esteem. Others' successes also lead to joy and pride, especially when the perceivers do not strive to enhance their own results. This way, others' successes are void of threat and enable increases in the perceivers' self-esteem due to basking in reflected glory (Tesser, 1988). However, they may also lead to resentment and envy. Envy is "an unpleasant, often painful emotion characterized by feelings of inferiority, hostility, and resentment caused by an awareness of a desired attribute enjoyed by another person or group" (Smith & Kim, 2007, p. 46). Resentment is a bitter feeling following successes of others who are perceived as not deserving their lot (Feather & Sherman, 2002). Both emotions are usually correlated and emerge in similar conditions of others' successes. In our reading, resentment and schadenfreude are emotional responses to different situations -others' successes or failures respectively. A stable link between the two emotions cannot be predicted unless they involve a psychological similarity, for example, the perceived others are disliked by the perceiver. Deservingness ...

Abstract. Crowdfunding enables fundraising of various ventures by collecting money from several donors. We argue that the inclusion of prosocial language contributes to success in this new domain of resource acquisition. In Study 1, we analyzed 164,056 projects from the online crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and found that the higher the percentage of prosocial words employed in a project’s description, the larger the number of investors and the greater the chances of reaching a funding goal. In Study 2 (N = 234), an experimental study, we documented that the use of prosocial words increases the support people thought they would give to a project. Our results indicate that people want to invest their financial resources in ventures that contribute to prosocial goals.

The present study tested the hypothesis that a threat of a just world belief intensifies experience of schadenfreude (i.e., pleasure at another's misfortune). The participants read scenarios which were designed to threaten or maintain their just world belief. Subsequently, they were transferred to an online magazine presenting funny stories about other peoples' failures. As presumed, the participants exposed to the threat of just world belief spent more time on reading. These results confirmed the existence of a link between just world threat and schadenfreude.