The Impact of Culture and Identity on Emotional Reactions to Insults

Abstract

People from honor cultures show heightened emotional responses to insults to their social image. The current research investigates whether people from honor cultures also show heightened protection of social identities. We find that honor concerns may be embedded in some social identities but not others, and that those identities associated with honor concerns are defended more than identities not associated with honor. Three experiments investigated participants' emotional responses to insults to their ethnic or student identity. Results showed that compared with dignity culture (British) participants, participants from an honor culture (Arab) reported stronger anger responses both across and within cultures when their Arab identity, an identity explicitly linked to honor concerns, was insulted. In contrast, responses did not differ between dignity (American) and honor (Arab) cultures when participants received an insult to their student identity, a non-honor-oriented identity. These findings suggest that overarching cultural values are not applied to all identities, and therefore, that cultural variables influence psychological outcomes differently for different identities.

How criminal organisations exert secret power over communities: An intracultural appropriation theory of cultural values and norms

“…Travaglino et al's (2014) findings suggested that honour is an important concern in southern Italy. Yet, those same cultural values and norms may become less relevant vis-à-vis other groups to which individuals also belong (Maitner, Mackie, Pauketat, & Smith, 2017; Rodriguez Mosquera, 2016).…”

The role of culture in appraisals, emotions and helplessness in response to threats

“…Second, this is the first study in cultures of honour research that utilizes appraisal theory by examining the path from appraisals to action readiness through emotions. A few studies that focused on appraisal theory primarily compared each component separately across different cultures (appraisals, emotions, and action readiness) rather than examining the relations among them (Maitner, Mackie, Pauketat, & Smith, 2017;Mesquita, 2001;Rodriguez Mosquera et al, 2000), or they examined the mediating role of motivations (e.g., motivation to punish the offender) between emotions and behaviours, without including the appraisal of the situation in their model as an antecedent of emotions (Rodriguez Mosquera et al, 2008). Finally, this is the first study that examines helplessness as a response to reputation threats.…”

“…Next, we examined whether participants' emotional responses (anger & shame) mediated the relation between appraisal of threats (humiliating & rude) and helplessness. We estimated the direct and indirect effects using bootstrap sampling (5000 resamples; Shrout & Bolger, 2002) on MPlus Version 8 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2017; see Figure 1). Turkey.…”

Social and emotional learning

“…Notably, the studies reported here were carried out in four educational jurisdictions (Canada, Croatia, France and the United States), and provided primary and secondary data from teachers and students at different ages. Research has shown that different cultures ascribe different values to conformity to social norms, commitment to group work and tolerance of differences, which might affect respondents' interpersonal relationships and subjective wellbeing (Chiu & Chow, 2011;Maitner, Mackie, Pauketat, & Smith, 2017). Given these cross-cultural differences, while readers need to take caution in generalising the findings to other cultures, the studies reported here do provide a strong foundation for extending the research to other cultural settings.…”