What makes people good at regulating others emotions, and does familiarity always breed liking?
Posted on Jul 22, 2010 by Karen Niven
There have been two additions to our EROS family this summer. Adam Satchwell and Giulia Poerio, both undergraduate Psychology students at the University of Sheffield, have been working on EROS-related projects, supervised by Karen and Eleanor from the Sheffield work and social groups. Below, Adam and Giulia tell us about the projects they have been working on, and what they have learned from their experiences…
Adam Satchwell. What makes people good at regulating others emotions?
The ability to regulate the emotions of others is accepted as an aspect of emotional intelligence, a skill or ability that different people have in different measures. We set out to find out what it was that made some people better then others at regulating their friends’ emotions. In particular, we were interested in personality characteristics like empathy and alexithymia (difficulty in identifying and describing subjective feelings).
To try and get an objective measure of just how good someone was at regulating their friends emotions we decided to use a ‘strategy matching task’. Pairs of friends came to the lab and were each presented with scenarios that we expected to elicit strong emotions, e.g., a situation in which a person had drunkenly cheated on his or her partner to elicit guilt. Participants were first asked to imagine their friend in that situation and to indicate which strategies (from a comprehensive list) they would use to change their friend’s feelings. After completing established scales to assess the personality characteristics of interest, participants then reread the scenarios imagining themselves in the situation and indicating the strategies they would want their friend to use to change their own feelings. This way we could mach the strategies selected by pairs of friends. In the terminology of signal detection theory, if person A wanted their friend to take them to the pub and person B selected that strategy, person B would get a ‘hit’ and would be seen as able to choose the most appropriate strategies.
After the fun of trying to get pairs of participants to turn up at the same time, we were able to correlate the scores they got on the strategy matching tasks with the various personality questionnaires they had completed. Here, we found that both aspects of empathy measured (empathic concern and perspective taking) were positively correlated with the number of hits (choosing the strategy for your friend that they chose) and negatively correlated with the number of misses (not choosing the strategy for your friend that they chose). These results though were mediated by how similar the two friends were in terms of the strategies they wanted to be used towards them, such that empathic people were only better able to select strategies because they wanted the same strategies as their friends. The aspect of alexithymia we measured; the tendency for external orientated thinking and the ignoring of internal motivations, drives and experiences, was found to be positively correlated with misses, so alexithymic individuals were worse at regulating their friends’ emotions. This begs the question of whether it is alexithymic individuals’ tendency to not focus on their own internal states, or the internal states of others, which leads them to be bad at interpersonal affect regulation?
I found the whole experience to be really interesting and well worth it. It was great getting some experience running an experiment from start to finish, and I’m sure it will come in handy when it comes to running my dissertation. It was different having to do statistical analysis where at first it wasn’t so obvious what we were looking for or what relationships we would find, and having to keep exploring the data. It was very different from the usual ‘see if the p value is below .05, say if it was significant or none significant and then move on to the next question’ statistics that I’m used to, and again I’m sure will be useful experience for the dissertation. It was also different meeting various people all looking at aspects of emotion regulation and hearing about the ‘cutting edge’ of research from the researchers themselves. And it was good just meeting post grads and academics, and I had no idea you could make a living entirely out of psychological research, which is definitely something I’m considering now. Though I also had no idea there was this horrifying ‘viva’ thing to look forward to either.
Giulia Poerio. Does familiarity always breed liking?
Have you ever heard a new song on the radio and thought ‘this is terrible’? A week later, after hearing it every day on the way to work it’s your favourite song! Or maybe, when you’re shopping for toilet paper you decide to opt for Andrex over Charmin because of the advert with the cute puppies! These are real life example of something called the Mere Exposure effect. Essentially, being exposed to something, even just once, has been found to lead to greater liking of whatever it was that you’d been exposed to. One of the explanations for this phenomenon, the Hedonic Familiarity model, suggests that previously encountered things are liked more because they are familiar and familiarity itself is a positive affective experience (the so called ‘warm glow of familiarity’). Interestingly, the Mere Exposure effect is also called the ‘familiarity breeds liking effect’. But, is this always the case? What about the old saying that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’?
Recent research has suggested that familiarity may not always have such a warm glow. De Vries et al., (2010) induced participants into either a happy or sad mood, and exposed them to various stimuli. When they were later asked to rate how much they liked a set of stimuli (half of which they had been exposed to) participants in a sad mood preferred the stimuli that they had seen before. Participants in a happy mood however, didn’t show any preference for the exposed stimuli although they did rate them as more familiar. It would appear therefore, that mood modulates the link between familiarity and positivity. In everyday terms they described their finding something like this; if you’re in a foreign country surrounded by different people and you see an old school friend you instantly feel better. In this situation familiarity is signalling safety in an intimidating and new environment and this translates to a positive and ‘warm’ experience. But if every day you walk down the same street to work, seeing the same people, day in day out, this familiarity isn’t a positive experience, it’s just normal! Building on this, we thought that maybe there are other situations and contexts that would serve to dull this ‘warm glow of familiarity’. Specifically, we thought that angry and smiling faces might be liked to a different extent even if they had both been seen before. Intuitively, it would seem that you would like smiling faces more than angry faces even if they are familiar. I know that I’d certainly like people more if they were smiling as opposed to scowling at me!
To explicitly test this, we selected smiling, neutral and angry faces from a database. We exposed participants to 10 faces of each facial expression for one second, and then got them to do a filler task of lateral thinking questions (incidentally participants were more interested in what the answers to these questions were as opposed to what the actual experiment was about!). After this we showed them all of the faces that they had seen in the first part plus the same amount of novel faces and asked them to rate (1-7) how much they liked each face and also how familiar they thought it was. So what did we find? Did people always prefer smiling faces more than angry and neutral faces?
The simple answer is no. What we found is that when faces are new, smiling faces are liked more than both neutral and angry faces. But when these faces are old (familiar), smiling, neutral and angry faces are all liked the same amount. So it would seem as if familiarity does breed liking even with negative stimuli; simply seeing angry faces once leads you to like them just as much as a smiling faces! So what does this mean? Does this mean that I still like my friends when they’re angry just as much as I do when they’re happy, but that if I meet somebody new and they looked angry I would dislike and avoid them? Probably. This seems to make some sort of sense to me. For example if your flatmate comes home after a stressful day and they’re angry about something your initial reaction probably wouldn’t be ‘I don’t like them anymore’. You know them, you know that they’re angry for a reason and maybe you’ll do something to get them to talk about how they’re feeling or let them vent about their day. Their angriness isn’t a danger signal to you, it’s perhaps a sign that you need to do something to cheer them up. Whereas, if you were in a pub and somebody that you didn’t know was sitting at the bar looking angry, you probably wouldn’t go over to them and ask them if they wanted to talk! In this kind of situation, you’d avoid this person in case their anger got directed at you.
Another interesting finding of ours was the relationship between participants’ ratings of liking and familiarity. As expected we found that faces that had been seen before were more familiar than ones that hadn’t. But if familiarity leads to liking then surely there would be a positive correlation between familiarity and liking; the more familiar something is the more liked it should be. What we actually found was that there was no relationship between liking and familiarity, and there was even a negative relationship between the two for angry seen faces. The more familiar an angry face that had been seen before was perceived to be, the less it was liked! This suggests to me that what’s going on with the Mere Exposure effect is a subconscious process outside of our immediate awareness; how familiar we think something is doesn’t really play a part in our affective reaction. So when people talk about this ‘warm glow of familiarity’ what they are really talking about is a warm glow of objective familiarity; subjective familiarity doesn’t breed liking but objective familiarity does.
So what have I learnt about the world of research apart from the fact that I can still like my friends even when they’re angry? I think the most important thing that I’ll take away with me is the knowledge that nobody has all the answers! We’re often taught things about Psychology as if they’re fact. Really what’s going on is that everyone’s trying to get that little bit closer to the truth of how things really are. What strikes me most is that psychological research is a dynamic and collaborative process whereby researchers are constantly trying to figure out the best way to explain findings and what they mean for our everyday lives.
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