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Abstract
People are often profoundly moved by the virtue or skill of others, yet psychology has little to say about the ‘other-praising’ family of emotions. Here we demonstrate that emotions such as elevation, gratitude, and admiration differ from more commonly studied forms of positive affect (joy and amusement) in many ways, and from each other in a few ways. The results of studies using recall, video induction, event-contingent diary, and letter-writing methods to induce other-praising emotions suggest that: elevation (a response to moral excellence) motivates prosocial and affiliative behavior, gratitude motivates improved relationships with benefactors, and admiration motivates self-improvement. Mediation analyses highlight the role of conscious emotion between appraisals and motivations. Discussion focuses on implications for emotion research, interpersonal relationships, and morality.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded with the generous support of a National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute of Mental Health and an additional NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biobehavioral issues in Physical and Mental Health (T32 MH15750) to the first author, and by the John Templeton foundation to the second author. We thank the many people who helped us collect and code these data, particularly Lee Fisher, Heather Gormsen, Abigail Goward, Michelle Hughes, Chris Kelly, Chris Oveis, Sean Thomason, Sarah Willcox, Emily Wilson, and Kristen Worrall. We also thank Jerry Clore for many helpful discussions about positive emotions, and Pablo Briñol, Barbara Fredrickson, and Sy-Miin Chow for thoughtful conversations about design and analysis. Margaret Clark, Jaime Kurtz, Simone Schnall, and Mark Zanna provided helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
Notes
1. In this study and in Study 2b, participants in the admiration condition were most likely to not follow the basic directions for the task or to experience negative emotions. These ‘bad’ data typically resulted because they wrote about something they themselves accomplished, things that simply happened to another person without display of skill or talent, or they focused on something negative about the story.
2. Just before making these emotion ratings, participants were asked to say, in their own words, what emotion they had felt, if any. When we grouped words together into semantically related clusters, as in Study 1, the results were consistent with those reported in . Participants in both elevation and admiration conditions were more likely to feel ‘uplifted’ as a result of seeing Trevor and Michael Jordan (23% and 33%, respectively, versus 0% of amusement participants). Admiration participants also reported feelings of awe/admiration (61%, compared to 8% elevation and 0% amusement), and they reported excitement/energy (33%, compared to 0% elevation and 7% of amusement). Finally, 86% of amusement participants reported feelings related to amusement, compared to 0% of elevation participants, and 7% admiration participants.
3. The individual items in the scale were not expected to combine into subscales. Exploratory factor analyses on the 10-item scale for Studies 2a and 2b did not produce consistent factor structures, so the data are presented for individual scale items in both studies.
4. Although participants reported on multiple events, making this data set ideal for multi-level modeling, the median number of events was too low to test for within-person (Level 1) effects, which requires a minimum of three records per person. Testing our two primary hypotheses about group (i.e., person-level; Level 2) differences with a program like HLM is primarily beneficial if there is a large discrepancy in the number of events recorded per person. We did run HLM analyses anyway, and determined that the slight increase in number of additional significant contrasts (due to increase in power) did not change the overall interpretation of the results, while the added length and complexity of reporting the results made the analyses harder to follow. We therefore used the more conservative method of aggregation followed by ANOVA. Those interested in reading a report of the HLM analyses should contact the first author.
5. The freely reported words are similar to those in Study 2a. Admiration participants most often used words related to awe/admiration (MAd = 53%, compared to MEl = 16% and MAm = 0%), Admiration participants also experienced more excitement/energy (MAd = 36%, compared to MEl = 2% and MAm = 10%). Amusement participants mostly used words related to amusement/humor (MAm = 91%, compared to MEl = 1% and MAd = 3%).
6. We considered the possibility that this aspect of the description would be more or less appealing to participants who were also born in or out of the state of North Carolina. We created a variable to indicate whether participants were born in North Carolina (1) or not (0); this variable did not independently predict choice, nor did it moderate effects of condition on choice that are presented later.
7. For those who may be curious about additional analyses, a set of dummy codes was established for the condition variable, with gratitude as the reference, to test whether people in the gratitude condition were more likely than those in either of the other conditions to choose the prosocial individual. Indeed, as predicted, participants in the gratitude condition were more likely than those in the admiration condition to choose the prosocial individual, B = −0.90, p = 0.09, two-tailed; OR = 0.41; and those in the gratitude condition were more likely than those in the control condition to choose the prosocial individual, B = −1.26, p = 0.02, two-tailed; OR = 0.28. These analyses controlled for sex of participant and the sex × condition interaction, but these variables did not produce significant effects.