Psychological Development and Education ›› 2013, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (6): 578-587.

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The Spotlight Effect of Anger:How the Incidental Anger Influence our Judgment on the Social News Report

PENG Xiao-fan1, XIE De-guang2, ZHANG Da-jun1   

  1. 1. Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China;
    2. Department of Students' Affair, Chongqing Technology and Business Institute, Chongqing 400715, China
  • Online:2013-11-15 Published:2013-11-15

Abstract: Originally, the spotlight effect was only a theory based on the valence of affect, explaining how the incidental emotion influences individual's perception and judgment through their attention scope. However, the usage of affect valence on these matters remains questionable and further studies on some specific kind of affect was necessary. Anger as a typical negative emotion, rather than sad used in the original study, was proved to be obscure in the defining of its valence. Therefore a 2 (affect)×2 (salience)×2 (gender) between subjects experiment was conducted to test the spotlight effect of anger the reading of social news report. 272 participants were enrolled into this experiment and 243's data was proved to be valid with the double check of affect-state before and after the emotion trigger. The Anger-Dispositional group contains 59 subjects (25 male; 34 female); Anger-Situational 61 subjects (26 male; 35 female); Neutral-Dispositional 60 (25 male; 35 female); Neutral-Situational 63 (23 male; 40 female). Rather than a scale anchored by dispositional-situational, this experiment in this research recorded subjects attribution on these two factors separately, which erase the potential implication of compelling choice on just one side. The result released that anger's spotlight effect was consist with negative emotion and its influence on individuals' judgment was a dual process: increase subjects' attribution proneness to the salience information while restrain to the less salient. Furthermore, this experiment also found the salience of information could bring about an attribution bias on its own. What is more, gender difference occurred on no conditions, which proved that the spotlight effect of anger words on male and female equally.This research offered a further evidence support for the theory of spotlight and extended its explication about how the anger influences individuals' attribution through the attention scope. The comparison between dispositional and situational information in the social news did not support the theory of fundamental attribution error and reminded us and FAE might remain to a unique phenomenon in western culture. The controversial issues between sad and anger was also fully discussed, which developed a reasonable explanation to suite the spotlight effect of anger with other related studies.

Key words: Anger, Spotlight Effect, Attribution, emotional valence

CLC Number: 

  • B844.3
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