When talking makes you feel like a group: The emergence of group-based emotions

Abstract

Group-based emotions are emotional reactions to group concerns and have been shown to emerge when people appraise events while endorsing a specific social identity. Here we investigate whether discussing a group-relevant event with other group members affects emotional reactions in a similar way. In two experiments, we confronted participants with an unfair group-relevant event, while manipulating their social identity and whether they discussed the event or an unrelated topic. Our major finding is that having group members discuss the unfair group-relevant event led to emotions that were more negative than in the irrelevant discussion and comparable to those observed when social identity had been made salient explicitly beforehand. Moreover, it also generated group-based appraisals of injustice (Experiment 1) and group-based identity (Experiment 2). This research sheds new light not only on the consequences of within-group sharing of emotions for the unfolding of intergroup relations but also on the nature of group-based emotions.

Keywords:

• Group-based emotions
• Group-based appraisals
• Self-categorisation
• Social identity
• Social interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Communauté française de Belgique [grant number ARC 06/11-337] awarded by the Catholic University of Louvain.