Beyond emotional similarity: The role of situation-specific motives.

Abstract

It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. However, people do not always express emotions that are similar to other group members, and the factors that determine when similarity occurs are not yet clear. In the current project, we examined whether certain situations activate specific emotional motives that influence the tendency to show emotional similarity. To test this possibility, we considered emotional responses to political situations that either called for weak (Studies 1 and 3) or strong (Study 2 and 4) negative emotions. Findings revealed that the motivation to feel weak emotions led people to be more influenced by weaker emotions than their own, whereas the motivation to feel strong emotions led people to be more influenced by stronger emotions than their own. Intriguingly, these motivations led people to change their emotions even after discovering that others' emotions were similar to their initial emotional response. These findings are observed both in a lab task (Studies 1-3) and in real-life online interactions on Twitter (Study 4). Our findings enhance our ability to understand and predict emotional influence processes in different contexts and may therefore help explain how these processes unfold in group behavior.

Negativity Spreads More than Positivity on Twitter after both Positive and Negative Political Situations

“…Previous research has suggested that political affiliation can be predicted by the political figures that users follow (Bail et al, 2018;Barberá, 2015;Brady et al, 2017;Goldenberg et al, 2019).…”

Collective Emotions

“…Such analyses can be done in online experiments that allow large numbers of individuals to interact with each other (or not) in predesigned social networks from their home computers (Coman, Momennejad, Drach, & Geana, 2016). In addition to these methods, we can measure bursts of activity or synchronization on digital media (Alvarez et al, 2015; Garas, Garcia, Skowron, & Schweitzer, 2012; Goldenberg et al, 2020). Collective-level emergent properties can be connected with individual-level results of experiments by using agent-based modeling, an approach that has seen recent advances (Garcia & Rimé, 2019).…”

“…At the individual level, the magnitude of emotions is dependent on individuals' construal of relevant stimuli. When emotions are experienced in the presence of other people, they tend to increase in magnitude, either because of emotion contagion between people (Goldenberg et al, 2020) or because people are motivated to communicate their emotions to others ( Jakobs, Manstead, & Fischer, 2001). This often means that collective emotions are characterized by increased intensity when experienced along with other individuals.…”

“To hope was to expect”: The impact of perspective taking and forecast type on wishful thinking

“…Importantly, we extended Experiment 1 in a couple ways. Mackie, 1986;Mackie & Cooper, 1984;Goldenberg et al, 2019) and assimilate their self-evaluations to similar others (Mussweiler, 2003a(Mussweiler, , 2003b.…”