Leveling up and down: The experiences of benign and malicious envy.

Envy is the painful emotion caused by the good fortune of others. This research empirically supports the distinction between two qualitatively different types of envy, namely benign and malicious envy. It reveals that the experience of benign envy leads to a moving-up motivation aimed at improving one’s own position, whereas the experience of malicious envy leads to a pulling-down motivation aimed at damaging the position of the superior other. Study 1 used guided recall of the two envy types in a culture (the Netherlands) that has separate words for benign and malicious envy. Analyses of the experiential content of these emotions found the predicted differences. Study 2 and 3 used one sample from the United States and one from Spain, respectively, where a single word exists for both envy types. A latent class analysis based on the experiential content of envy confirmed the existence of separate experiences of benign and malicious envy in both these cultures as well. The authors discuss the implications of distinguishing the two envy types for theories of cooperation, group performance, and Schadenfreude. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Not so ugly after all: When shame acts as a commitment device.

Most psychological theories and research on shame focus on the ugly aspects and negative consequences of this emotion. Theories on moral emotions, however, assume that shame acts as a commitment device motivating prosocial behavior. To solve this apparent paradox, the authors studied the effects of shame on prosocial behavior. Shame was hypothesized to motivate prosocial behavior when it was relevant for the decision at hand (endogenous). In contrast, shame that was not relevant for the decision at hand (exogenous) was hypothesized to have no such effects. Four experiments with three different shame inductions and two different measures of prosocial behavior confirmed that endogenous shame motivated prosocial behavior for proselfs but that exogenous shame did not. Shame is shown to have a clear interpersonal function in the sense that it acts as a commitment device. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The inaction effect in the psychology of regret.

Previous research showed that decisions to act (i.e., actions) produce more regret than decisions not to act (i.e., inactions). This previous research focused on decisions made in isolation and ignored that decisions are often made in response to earlier outcomes. The authors show in 4 experiments that these prior outcomes may promote action and hence make inaction more abnormal. They manipulated information about a prior outcome. As hypothesized, when prior outcomes were positive or absent, people attributed more regret to action than to inaction. However, as predicted and counter to previous research, following negative prior outcomes, more regret was attributed to inaction, a finding that the authors label the inaction effect. Experiment 4, showing differential effects for regret and disappointment, demonstrates the need for emotion-specific predictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of interpersonal harm in distinguishing regret from guilt.

Regret and guilt are emotions that are produced by negative outcomes for which one is responsible. Both emotions have received ample attention in the psychological literature; however, it is still unclear to what extent regret and guilt represent distinct psychological processes. We examined the extent to which the distinction between interpersonal harm (negative outcomes for others) and intrapersonal harm (negative outcomes for self) is crucial in differentiating these two emotions. In a series of 3 studies we found that guilt is predominantly felt in situations of interpersonal harm, whereas regret is felt in both situations of interpersonal harm and intrapersonal harm. Moreover, the results show that in situations of interpersonal harm the phenomenology of regret shares many, but not all features with the phenomenology of guilt. We conclude that the emotion processes resulting from interpersonal and intrapersonal harm are clearly distinct, but that regret as an emotion label is applied to both types of processes whereas the emotion label guilt is primarily used to refer to experiences of interpersonal harm. Implications for emotion research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is moral about guilt? Acting “prosocially” at the disadvantage of others.

For centuries economists and psychologists have argued that the morality of moral emotions lies in the fact that they stimulate prosocial behavior and benefit others in a person's social environment. Many studies have shown that guilt, arguably the most exemplary moral emotion, indeed motivates prosocial behavior in dyadic social dilemma situations. When multiple persons are involved, however, the moral and prosocial nature of this emotion can be questioned. The present article shows how guilt can have beneficial effects for the victim of one's actions but also disadvantageous effects for other people in the social environment. A series of experiments, with various emotion inductions and dependent measures, all reveal that guilt motivates prosocial behavior toward the victim at the expense of others around—but not at the expense of oneself. These findings illustrate that a thorough understanding of the functioning of emotions is necessary to understand their moral nature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional Reactions to the Outcomes of Decisions: The Role of Counterfactual Thought in the Experience of Regret and Disappointment

Children's phonological sensitivity is a strong predictor of the development of reading skills. Recent evidence indicates that phonological sensitivity and reading are reciprocally related. That is, phonological sensitivity facilitates the development of early reading and early reading facilitates the development of phonological sensitivity. Whereas evidence for this reciprocal relation has come from studies with school-age children, this study examined the relation between phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge in 97 middle-income 4- and 5-year-old children in a 1-year longitudinal study. Multiple regression analyses revealed that phonological sensitivity predicted growth in letter knowledge, and letter knowledge predicted growth in phonological sensitivity when controlling for children's age and oral language abilities. These results indicate that the reciprocal relation between reading and phonological sensitivity is present relatively early in the development of literacy skills, prior to the onset of formal reading instruction.     

Enemies and Friends in the Neighborhood: Orthographic Similarity Effects in Semantic Categorization.

Studies investigating orthographic similarity effects in semantic tasks have produced inconsistent results. The authors investigated orthographic similarity effects in animacy decision and in contrast with previous studies, they took semantic congruency into account. In Experiments 1 and 2, performance to a target (cat) was better if a previously studied neighbor (rat) was congruent (i.e., belonged to the same animate-inanimate category) than it was if it was incongruent (e.g., mat). In Experiments 3 and 4, performance was better for targets with more preexisting congruent neighbors than for targets with more preexisting incongruent neighbors. These results demonstrate that orthographic similarity effects in semantic categorization are conditional on semantic congruency. This strongly suggests that semantic information becomes available before orthographic processing has been completed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociating emotion-induced blindness and hypervision.

Previous findings suggest that emotional stimuli sometimes improve (emotion-induced hypervision) and sometimes impair (emotion-induced blindness) the visual perception of subsequent neutral stimuli. We hypothesized that these differential carryover effects might be due to 2 distinct emotional influences in visual processing. On the one hand, emotional stimuli trigger a general enhancement in the efficiency of visual processing that can carry over onto other stimuli. On the other hand, emotional stimuli benefit from a stimulus-specific enhancement in later attentional processing at the expense of competing visual stimuli. We investigated whether detrimental (blindness) and beneficial (hypervision) carryover effects of emotion in perception can be dissociated within a single experimental paradigm. In 2 experiments, we manipulated the temporal competition for attention between an emotional cue word and a subsequent neutral target word by varying cue–target interstimulus interval (ISI) and cue visibility. Interestingly, emotional cues impaired target identification at short ISIs but improved target identification when competition was diminished by either increasing ISI or reducing cue visibility, suggesting that emotional significance of stimuli can improve and impair visual performance through distinct perceptual mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When guilt evokes self-punishment: Evidence for the existence of a Dobby Effect.

Feelings of guilt may be resolved in various ways. The scientific literature has mainly highlighted beneficial interpersonal consequences of guilt, showing repeatedly that guilt motivates compensatory pro-social behavior to repair social bonds. The authors reveal that when opportunities for compensation are not present, guilt may evoke self-punishment. Self-punishment was demonstrated through self-denied pleasure in a scenario study, and by self-enforced penalties in an experimental study. The authors call this tendency for self-punishment the Dobby Effect, and discuss it as an explanation for the widely held conviction that atonement absolves sins, its contribution to some types of psychopathology, as well as its possible functional relevance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inhibition from nonword primes in lexical decision reexamined: The critical influence of instructions.

Compound-cue theory predicts that lexical decisions are slower to word targets preceded by a nonword than to word targets preceded by an unrelated word. This nonword-prime inhibition effect is not predicted by spreading-activation theories. R. Ratcliff and G. McKoon (1995) obtained nonword-prime inhibition, whereas T. R McNamara (1994b) failed to obtain it. In the present study, for both a 200-ms and 350-ms prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony, nonword-prime inhibition was obtained for participants who, as in Ratcliff and McKoon's research, received instructions that mentioned that prime and target could be related. No nonword-prime inhibition was found for participants who, as in McNamara's research, received instructions that did not mention the possibility of a prime-target relation. Neither compound cue nor spreading activation can explain this pattern. The possibility that nonword-prime inhibition results from response competition is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)