Perceived social pressure not to experience negative emotion is linked to selective attention for negative information

ABSTRACT

Social norms and values may be important predictors of how people engage with and regulate their negative emotional experiences. Previous research has shown that social expectancies (the perceived social pressure not to feel negative emotion (NE)) exacerbate feelings of sadness. In the current research, we examined whether social expectancies may be linked to how people process emotional information. Using a modified classical flanker task involving emotional rather than non-emotional stimuli, we found that, for those who experienced low levels of NE, social expectancies were linked to the selective avoidance of negative emotional information. Those who experienced high levels of NE did not show a selective avoidance of negative emotional information. The findings suggest that, for people who experience many NEs, social expectancies may lead to discrepancies between how they think they ought to feel and the kind of emotional information they pay attention to.

KEYWORDS:

• Social appraisal
• social expectancies
• emotion norms
• selective attention
• negativity bias
• depression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The CES-D was administered again during the study, and participants who did not complete the CES-D pre-screening did not differ from those who did in their CES-D scores (p = .699).

2 Data were collected during wave 1 of a three-wave longitudinal study. Participants received the maximum reimbursement for each wave if they completed all laboratory tasks and completed at least 80% of all ESM questionnaires. Participants could receive a €60 bonus if they completed all three waves.

3 Internal reliability for both scales was acceptable although low. The measures used were shorter than in previous research, where reliabilities were better (Bastian et al., 2012). Low internal reliability in this shorter version may be due to the diverse focus of each scale item, applied to four different types of negative emotion. In line with the perspective provided by McCrae, Kurtz, Yamagata, and Terracciano (2011) that internal consistency is not a strong predictor of scale validity, we proceeded to use the entire measure.

4 Although we did not predict any interaction effects of social expectancies and positive emotion, we examined these data. This revealed that social expectancies did not interact with positive emotion to predict any of the dependent variables (β’s < .06, p’s ≥ .37).