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Helpful Contextual Information Before or After Negative Events: Effects on Appraisal and Emotional Reaction

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Abstract

This study investigated the effect of helpful contextual information, presented before and after a negative event, on modifying appraisal and emotional reaction. Through the scenario technique, a basic situation of negative outcome (in health or hobby domain) entailing appraisal of high responsibility and low remediability (control condition) was manipulated by adding—separately or together—two types of contextual information able to modify the two appraisal dimensions: knowing that other people shared the same outcome (sharing) and knowing that it was possible to remediate the negative outcome (remedy possibility). In half scenarios, the information was presented before the event, and in the other half after the event. We expected that sharing and remedy possibility would selectively affect the two appraisal dimensions which in turn would selectively affect the emotions chosen to assess emotional reaction. We also expected that the event-preceding information would be more effective than the event-following information. On the whole, the results corroborated our predictions but also revealed unexpected effects that have been discussed.

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Notes

  1. For the risky excursion scenario, mean of responsibility (on a 7-point scale where 1 = not at all, and 7 = extremely) was 5.34 (s.d. = 1.03), and mean of remediability (on the same scale) was 3.21 (s.d. = 0.87); for the gardening competition scenario, mean of responsibility was 5.12 (s.d. = 0.93), and mean of remediability was 3.42 (s.d. = 0.84); across both scenarios, the intensity of negative emotions (assessed on the same scale) ranged from 4.01 (shame) to 5.40 (anger toward circumstances); the intensity of positive emotions ranged from 1,83 (relief) to 3,52 (hope).

  2. Following the suggestion of an anonymous referee, we accounted for the rationale underlying the creation of four levels of the variable “contextual information.” The first level (i.e., the absence of any further information about the event) represented the control condition against which to evaluate the effectiveness of experimental manipulation; the second and third levels were built in order to evaluate the effects of each type of information presented in the experiment; the fourth level (i.e., the presence of both types of information) was built in order to investigate whether the supposed effects of each information added up or whether one of the two types of information was perceived as more relevant than the other: In this case, only the effects of the more relevant information should occur.

  3. Although the main position in the regret literature [e.g., 47, 48] claims that this emotion is elicited by a negative outcome following a bad choice, i.e., that responsibility is a necessary condition for its genesis, other findings from Italian samples [49] did not support this position. They showed that regret is independent from responsibility.

  4. Risky excursion and male were coded as 1; garden competition and female were coded as 0.

  5. This term is used for brevity to indicate the subjective perception of remediability.

  6. The macro is available on http://www.afhayes.com/public/mediate.sps.

  7. The effect of the independent variable on mediators calculated by the macro is not reported here since it was already assessed trough ANCOVAs. It is noteworthy to specify that all tests of homogeneity of regression showed the absence of interaction between the independent variable and the mediators.

  8. This finding, as well as that regarding the inconsistent mediation relative to positive emotions, supports the position of the authors [50, 53, 54] that posit that mediation effects can be met even in the absence of a significant total effect of X on Y.

  9. The only direct effect exerted by the remedy possibility was on positive emotions, whose intensity increased independently from the mediation of remediability.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Stefania La Gamma for contributing to collect the data for this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Second University of Naples, Naples, Italy

    Olimpia Matarazzo, Ivana Baldassarre, Giovanna Nigro, Marina Cosenza & Lucia Abbamonte

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  1. Olimpia Matarazzo
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  2. Ivana Baldassarre
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  3. Giovanna Nigro
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  4. Marina Cosenza
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  5. Lucia Abbamonte
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Correspondence to Olimpia Matarazzo.

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Matarazzo, O., Baldassarre, I., Nigro, G. et al. Helpful Contextual Information Before or After Negative Events: Effects on Appraisal and Emotional Reaction. Cogn Comput 6, 640–651 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-014-9275-y

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