ON THE SOCIAL INELUENCE OF EMOTIONS IN GROUPS 265 The Present Research Studv 1 The theoretic Fr In Study I our aim wa to establish the hynothesized relatio een majority emotions and felt acceptance and rejection bya individual y ould feel re cted if the ma themselves in I his or no on.We pathsho subiecti ed f We fur expected that participants would report feeling more rejected r deviance.as it makes the devian on than after a r eutral reaction.V ncluded the di ual to seek ways to restore the sense of belonging.In ligh 1974 ts to fe angry reaction. the xtent to which (a)the devi ant is motiv ated t s t Method Participants and design.One hundred and fifteen individual e tested the basic on the which was ve to part of a test ry in which first-ve pu digm to te wheth actions from the majority:anger.happiness.disappoint erials and p Vigne vignette that des udy 3).In Studv ated.The t）had come ds to dis de on th tion nt d ted. asimulated group interaction.and w y ended with"When it's your tum,you tell the others where oto our n the introductions to the m(happiness cond and nd react neutral"(control condition).We used the word enthus all of ()b cause and 5)denenden than wed ting the 2002 put from the redu der made.Finally.with regards to hypothesis testing.weused onperson feels rejected, is motivated to seek acceptance in a given group, and if conformity is likely to elicit acceptance because it will be both perceived and appreciated by the group. The Present Research The theoretical model guiding this research is depicted in Figure 1. The first path in the model represents our hypothesis that a deviant individual would feel rejected if the majority expresses anger about his or her deviance, whereas the deviant individual would feel accepted if the majority expresses happiness. The second path shows how this subjective sense of acceptance or rejection, in turn, affects the behavior of the deviant individual. We expected that a happy reaction would not motivate behavioral change or would elicit further deviance, as it makes the deviant feel that his or her deviant behavior is acceptable. Feeling rejected after an angry reaction, on the other hand, might motivate the individual to seek ways to restore the sense of belonging. In light of the view of conformity as strategic behavior aimed at gaining acceptance in a group (e.g., Asch, 1956; Noelle-Neumann, 1974), we proposed that whether a deviant individual conforms to the majority position after an angry reaction from the group depends on the extent to which (a) the deviant is motivated to (re)gain acceptance in the group, and (b) conformity is a possible means to this end. We examined these ideas in five studies. In Study 1, we tested the basic idea that emotional expressions are interpreted as signals of an individual’s inclusionary status using a vignette approach. Then, we tested the influence of the motive to be reaccepted by manipulating the availability of alter￾native groups in another vignette study, Study 2. Next, we used a critical incidents paradigm to test whether happiness and anger are associated with differences in the perceived pressure to conform and whether this association is affected by the extent to which the situation is perceived as cooperative or competitive, as this deter￾mines whether conformity is an effective means to gain accep￾tance. We also tested if felt acceptance or rejection could account for this association (Study 3). In Study 4, we extended and repli￾cated these findings in a cooperative group task involving real interaction and a behavioral outcome measure. Finally, we tested the influence of the extent to which one’s status as a group member is secure, as another factor determining the motive to be reac￾cepted, using a simulated group interaction, and we tested whether emotional expressions produce conformity that lasts over time (Study 5). The specific hypotheses concerning these moderators will be developed in the introductions to the respective studies. On a statistical note, we use variants of regression analysis (in the statistical computing software R Version 2.15.1; R Core Team, 2012) for all of our analyses. There are two reasons for this choice. First, regression analysis can accommodate both dichotomous (Studies 2 and 5) and continuous (Studies 1, 3, 4, and 5) dependent variables and allowed us to do multilevel analysis (Study 4), thereby providing statistical consistency across studies. Second, regression coefficients were necessary for conducting the (moder￾ated) mediation analyses that were required to test our theoretical model (Preacher, Rucker, & Hayes, 2007). By focusing on regres￾sion output from the outset, we avoid reporting redundant statis￾tical analyses. To facilitate interpretation, we also reported means and standard deviations wherever comparisons between groups are made. Finally, with regards to hypothesis testing, we used one￾tailed tests to test directional hypotheses and two-tailed tests in all other cases. Whenever a one-tailed test is used, we noted it explicitly in the text. Study 1 In Study 1, our aim was to establish the hypothesized relation between majority emotions and felt acceptance and rejection by a deviant group member. Participants imagined themselves in a group in which a majority reacted with anger, happiness, disap￾pointment, or no emotion to their own deviant opinion. We mea￾sured the extent to which participants would feel accepted or rejected from the group as a result of this emotional expression. We expected that participants would report feeling more rejected after an angry reaction than after a neutral reaction, whereas participants were expected to feel more accepted after a happy reaction than after a neutral reaction. We included the disappoint￾ment condition to rule out the possibility that any effects of majority anger on feeling rejected could be attributed to the reac￾tion being generally negative in nature, and we expected partici￾pants to feel less rejected after a disappointed reaction than after an angry reaction. Method Participants and design. One hundred and fifteen individuals (26 men, 88 women, one individual missing demographic infor￾mation, Mage
21.03, range 17–54 years)1 took part in the experiment, which was part of a test battery in which first-year psychology students participated to fulfill a course requirement. Participants were randomly assigned to receive one of four emo￾tional reactions from the majority: anger, happiness, disappoint￾ment, or neutral (i.e., no emotion). Materials and procedure. Vignette. Participants first read a short vignette that described a group situation in which the majority’s emotion was manipu￾lated. The protagonist (same sex as the participant) had come together with three same-sex friends to discuss and decide on their vacation destination. All three friends shared a preference for one destination, while the protagonist had picked a different destina￾tion. Thus, the situation resembled a standard conformity paradigm (e.g., Asch, 1956) with a majority of modal size (Bond, 2005). The story ended with “When it’s your turn, you tell the others where you’d like to go. Your friends don’t immediately agree with you . . .,” followed by “. . . and react with anger” (anger condition), “. . . but react with enthusiasm” (happiness condition), “. . . and react with disappointment” (disappointment condition), or “. . . and react neutral” (control condition). We used the word enthusi￾asm (enthousiasme in Dutch) instead of happiness (blij) because it was more ecologically valid in this situation. Although enthusiasm may imply slightly more arousal than happiness according to intrapersonal affect circumplex models (e.g., Russell & Barrett, 1 In all experiments reported in this article, we checked whether the genders were balanced over condition as a precondition to running our analyses. Although the low number of males in all studies did not permit us to conduct analyses using participant gender reliably, explorative inclu￾sion of this factor in the discussed models revealed only isolated indica￾tions of effects of participant gender, none of which challenged our main conclusions. We therefore do not discuss this variable in any of our studies. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. ON THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF EMOTIONS IN GROUPS 265