The anger-infused Ultimatum Game: A reliable and valid paradigm to induce and assess anger.

Abstract

The Ultimatum Game (UG) is a canonical social decision-making task whereby a proposer divides a sum of money between himself and a responder who accepts or rejects the offer. Studies consistently demonstrate that unfair offers induce anger, and that rejecting such offers relates to aggression. Nevertheless, the UG is limited in interpersonal provocations common to real-life experiences of anger. Moreover, the psychometric properties of the UG as an anger-induction paradigm have yet to be evaluated. Here, to induce a more intense and genuine anger experience, we implemented a modified UG whereby short written provocations congruent with unfairness levels accompanied each offer. We aimed to test whether this anger-infused UG led to more anger and aggressive responses relative to the standard UG and to establish the reliability and validity of both versions. Participants performed either the anger-infused UG or a standard version, repeated twice, a week apart. They also performed the Taylor Aggression Paradigm, a reactive aggression paradigm, and completed emotion ratings and a trait anger inventory. Results indicate similar decreases in acceptance rates with increase in offer unfairness, and increases in reported anger, across both UG versions. Both versions demonstrated strong test-retest reliability. However, the anger-infused UG led to significantly stronger relations with reactive aggression and trait anger compared to the standard UG, providing evidence for better validity. The development of the anger-infused UG as a reliable and valid paradigm is pivotal for the induction and assessment of interpersonal anger and its aggressive expression in basic and clinical research settings. (PsycINFO Database Record

Self-Control Modulates the Behavioral Response of Interpersonal Forgiveness

“…The results show that after the participants completed the adapted UG, they felt more anger and less happy than the emotional states at the baseline. This result is consistent with previous research using the UG, which has shown that UG can induce the negative feelings of the subjects and let the subjects experience similar feelings after being offended in an actual situation (Sanfey et al, 2003;Harlé et al, 2010;Gilam et al, 2019). In UG, when subjects encountered an unfair opponent's proposal, they feel that they were offended or unfairly treated and that their self-interest was damaged, which caused negative emotions (Sanfey et al, 2003).…”

“…After being offended, the dominant response toward a perpetrator is anger, hostility, or revenge rather than forgiveness (Slotter et al, 2012;Civai, 2013;Gilam et al, 2019). When choosing to forgive, individuals have to overcome the influence of automated negative reactions (e.g., hostility and revenge), which requires the involvement of cognitive control or self-control (Pronk et al, 2010;Wilkowski et al, 2010;Maier et al, 2018).…”

“…The first stage was the adapted "UG" in which the participants would experience offense or unfair treatment and then observe the allocation proposal of participants made in the adapted "DG" as indexes of forgiveness or not. Previous studies have found that the behavioral measure paradigm of forgiveness can induce the same offensive feelings as in the real environment and has a significant positive correlation with individuals' self-reported trait forgiveness (Sanfey et al, 2003;Harlé et al, 2010;Carlisle et al, 2012;Dorn et al, 2014;Gilam et al, 2019). On this basis, we made two hypotheses: (1) after completing the adapted UG, participants would express emotional fluctuation because of the unfair experience; and (2) participants with high self-control would give a more fair distribution to opponents who previously treated them unfairly than those with low self-control.…”

Empathy Mediates the Relationship Between Motivations After Transgression and Forgiveness

“…Avoidance and revenge probably are two main motivations toward a perpetrator after being offended ( McCullough and Hoyt, 2002 ). This is because negative emotional responses like fear, anger, or sadness are predominant responses toward offenses ( Slotter et al, 2012 ; Civai, 2013 ; Gilam et al, 2019 ). However, people sometimes can restrain their instinctive impulses to retaliate or avoid and choose forgiveness as an effective strategy to maintain the relationship ( Billingsley and Losin, 2017 ).…”

Mediating role of attenuated physiological arousal on the association between psychopathic traits and fairness norm violation

“…However, if the second player rejects the offer, then neither player receives any money. Rejections of unfair UG offers are generally considered to be punishment or revenge toward the first player who made the offer 27 , and are associated with negative emotions, especially anger 28,29 . Since offers in the UG are more likely to be fair than offers in the DG 30 , the performance of the first player in the UG may be affected by psychological factors, including emotions in response to the possibility of having low offers rejected.…”