How long can cultural events elevate group identity salience? The mediating role of affective adaptation

Abstract

Cultural events have been found to make one’s group identity temporarily more salient. How long such an elevated sense of identity can endure remains, however, an empirical question. Building upon the model of affective adaptation, we propose that the elevated sense of group identity may decrease quickly during a culturally important event, and this process is mediated by the decline of positive emotions during the event. Consistent with this prediction, a diary study (Study 1) with a Chinese sample observed that Chinese identity was very salient at the beginning of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and then was gradually neutralized during the event. Moreover, the dissipation of positive emotions during the event mediated temporal change of the salience of Chinese identity. An experiment (Study 2) further showed that positive emotions during national-identity-related events could create the initial elevation and subsequent decline of the salience of the group identity.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• identity salience
• affective adaptation
• cultural event

Acknowledgement

We thank Richard Lucas and Chi-yue Chiu for their thoughtful comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

Notes

1. We have conducted priori power analysis, assuming that the overall effect of a repeated-measures analysis with 11 within-subject categories reflects a medium effect size of f and that the association among measures across 11 within-subject categories reflects a large inter-correlation. The required sample size to achieve statistical power of at least 80% with the control of alpha at .05 is 13. In this study, to balance the combinations of the order of articles/stories, we recruited 22 participants for two conditions, with 11 different combinations in each condition. Therefore, it is argued that the current sample size could probably detect the significant within-subject effect across 11 categories with adequate statistical power given that the true effect is significant.