Social referencing and social appraisal: commentary on the Clément and Dukes (2016) and Walle et al. (2016) articles

We comment on two articles on social referencing and social appraisal. We agree with Walle, Reschke, and Knothe’s (2017) argument that at one level of analysis, social referencing and social appraisal are functionally equivalent: In both cases, another person’s emotional expression is observed and this expression informs the observer’s own emotional reactions and behavior. However, we also agree with Clément and Dukes’s (2017) view that (at another level of analysis), there is an important difference between social referencing and social appraisal. We also argue that they are likely to occur at different stages of emotion process

Emotional reactions to the outcomes of decisions: The role of counterfactual thought in the experience of regret and disappointment

decision making;consumer behavior

“Fury, us”: Anger as a basis for new group self-categories

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordWe tested the hypothesis that shared emotions, notably anger, influence the formation of new self-categories. We first measured participants' (N = 89) emotional reactions to a proposal to make university assessment tougher before providing feedback about the reactions of eight other co-present individuals. This feedback always contained information about the other individuals' attitudes to the proposals (four opposed and four not opposed) and in the experimental condition emotion information (of those opposed, two were angry, two were sad). Participants self-categorised more with, and preferred to work with, angry rather than sad targets, but only when participants' own anger was high. These findings support the idea that emotions are a potent determinant of self-categorisation, even in the absence of existing, available self-categories

The psychology of social class: how socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour

Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live has a lasting impact on their personal and social identities, and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle-class counterparts, lower/working-class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self-concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working-class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely-held view that working-class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat.their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self-concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working-class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely-held view that working-class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat