Journal article

Context shapes social judgments of positive emotion suppression and expression

EK Kalokerinos, KH Greenaway, JP Casey

Emotion | AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC | Published : 2017

Abstract

It is generally considered socially undesirable to suppress the expression of positive emotion. However, previous research has not considered the role that social context plays in governing appropriate emotion regulation. We investigated a context in which it may be more appropriate to suppress than express positive emotion, hypothesizing that positive emotion expressions would be considered inappropriate when the valence of the expressed emotion (i.e positive) did not match the valence of the context (i.e negative). Six experiments (N = 1,621) supported this hypothesis: when there was a positive emotioncontext mismatch, participants rated targets who suppressed positive emotion as more appr..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme


Funding Acknowledgements

Elise K. Kalokerinos is supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellowship (704298) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Katharine H. Greenaway is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE160100761) and by an award from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research: Social Interactions, Identity, and Well-being Program. We thank Karly Head, Cassandra Brady, Kate Watson, and Nicholas Williams for their assistance with data collection, and Loraine Chui, Robert Faraone, Sienna Hinton-Pryde, Greg Lewin, and Matawan Srisawad for their assistance with video coding.