Department of Psychology, Stanford University.
Emotion. 2018 Feb;18(1):116-126. doi: 10.1037/emo0000309. Epub 2017 Apr 13.
People tend to judge themselves as exhibiting above average levels of desirable traits-including competence, kindness, and life satisfaction-but does this self-enhancement extend to emotional responses? Here, we explore this question by having people attribute emotions to themselves and others following simple gambles. We demonstrate that people display an emotional self-enhancement bias that varies with the context of the emotion-eliciting situation. People judge themselves as experiencing more positive emotional reactions on average, and they also believed that others' emotions are more sensitive to gamble outcomes, such that people judge others to experience stronger negative affect in response to negative outcomes (Study 1). This self-enhancement bias further tracks social distance, such that people attribute less positive and more negative emotion to more dissimilar, as compared with more similar others (Study 2). People also predict less favorable emotional states for themselves and others experiencing events in the future, as compared with the present (Study 3), suggesting that this attribution bias extends across multiple dimensions of psychological distance. Broadly, these data suggest that people exhibit self-enhancement in emotion attribution, but do so in subtle ways that depend on situational and social factors. (PsycINFO Database Record
人们往往认为自己具有高于平均水平的理想特质，包括能力、善良和生活满意度，但这种自我提升是否延伸到了情绪反应？在这里，我们通过让人们在简单的赌博后将情绪归因于自己和他人，来探讨这个问题。我们证明，人们表现出一种情绪的自我增强偏差，这种偏差随着引发情绪的情境而变化。人们平均认为自己会有更积极的情绪反应，他们还认为他人的情绪对赌博结果更敏感，因此人们判断他人在面对负面结果时会产生更强烈的负面情绪（研究 1）。这种自我增强偏差进一步与社交距离相关，即人们将较少的积极情绪和更多的消极情绪归因于与自己不太相似的人，而不是与自己更相似的人（研究 2）。与当下相比，人们也预测自己和他人在未来经历事件时的情绪状态不太理想（研究 3），这表明这种归因偏差延伸到了多个心理距离维度。总的来说，这些数据表明，人们在情绪归因中表现出自我增强，但这种增强是以依赖情境和社会因素的微妙方式表现出来的。
