Losing Face on Social Media: Threats to Positive Face Lead to an Indirect Effect on Retaliatory Aggression Through Negative Affect
Abstract
A three-condition (rejection, criticism, control) single-factor experiment (N = 78) reveals that even relatively minor face-threatening acts of rejection or criticism on a social-networking site similar to Facebook lead to increases in self-reported negative affect and retaliatory aggression, compared with a control. A mediation model demonstrates that face-threatening acts lead to direct effects on negative affect and an indirect affect on retaliatory aggression through negative affect. Findings are discussed in relations to face theory and politeness theory.
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
References
Andersson L. M., Pearson C. M. (1999). Tit for tat? The spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy of Management Review, 24, 452-471.
Bakshy E., Simmons M. P., Huffaker D. A., Teng C., Adamic L. A. (2010, May). The social dynamics of economic activity in a virtual world. Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Washington, DC.
Baumeister R. F., Leary M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human need. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529.
Blackhart G. C., Nelson B. C., Knowles M. L., Baumeister R. F. (2009). Rejection elicits emotional reactions but neither causes immediate distress nor lowers self-esteem: A meta-analytic review of 192 studies on social exclusion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13, 269-309.
Bolls P. D. (2010). Understanding emotion from a superordinate dimensional perspective: A productive way forward for communication processes and effects studies. Communication Monographs, 77, 146-152.
Brett J. M., Oleakalns M., Friedman R., Goates N., Anderson C., Lisco C. C. (2007). Sticks and stones: Language, face, and online dispute resolution. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 85-99.
Brown P., Levinson S.C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. NY: Cambridge Press.
Bushman B. J., Huesmann L. R. (2010). Aggression. In Fiske S. T., Gilbert D. T., Lindzey G. (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, 5th ed., pp. 833-863). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Caza B. B., Cortina L. M. (2007). From insult to injury: Explaining the impact of incivility. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 29, 335-350.
Cohen J. (1992). A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 155-159.
Crawford J. R., Henry J. D. (2004). The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS): Construct validity, measurement properties and normative data in a large non-clinical sample. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 43, 245-265.
Cupach W. R., Carson C. L. (2002). Characteristics and consequences of interpersonal complaints with perceived face threat. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 19, 443-462.
Dasborough M. T., Sinclair M., Russell-Bennett R., Tombs A. (2008). Measuring emotion: Methodological issues and alternative. In Ashkanasy N. M., Coooper C. L. (Eds.), Research companion to emotions in organizations (pp. 197-210). Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Dillard J. P., Shen L. (2005). On the nature of reactance and its role in persuasive health communication. Communication Monographs, 72, 144-168.
Du Prel J. B., Hommel G., Rohrig B., Blettner M. (2009). Confidence interval or p-value? Part 4 of a series of evaluation of scientific publications. Deutsches Arzteblatt International, 106, 335-339.
Duthler K. W. (2006). The politeness of requests made via email and voic email: Support for the hyperpersonal model. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, 500-521.
Faul F., Erdfelder E., Lang A., Buchner A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavioral Research Methods, 39, 175-191.
Goffman E. (1955). Presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Goffman E., Best J. (2005). Interaction ritual: Essays in face-to-face behavior. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=qDhd138pPBAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Graesser A. C. (1981). Prose comprehension beyond the word. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
Hancock J. T., Landrigan C., Silver C. (April/May, 2007). Expressing emotion in text-based communication. Proceedings of the CHI ’07 of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, CA.
Hayes A. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis. New York, NY: Guilford.
Kennedy-Lightsey C. D. (2010). Recognizing contributions: Face-support and face-threat influences students’ emotional and communicative response. Communication Research Reports, 27, 20-29.
Krosnick J. A., Judd C. M., Wittenbrink B. (2005). The measurement of attitudes. In Albarracin D., Johnson B. T., Zanna M. P. (Eds.), The handbook of attitudes (pp. 21-76). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Locher M. A., Watts R. J. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 9-33.
MacDonald G., Leary M. R. (2005). Why does social exclusion hurt? The relationship between social and physical pain. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 202-223.
Metts S., Cupach W. R. (2008). Face theory. In Baxter L. A., Braithwaite D. O. (Eds.), Engaging theories in interpersonal communication (pp. 203-214). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Nabi R. L. (2010). The case for emphasizing discrete emotions in communication research. Communication Monographs, 77, 153-159.
Oetzel J. G., Ting-Toomey S. (2003). Face concerns in interpersonal conflict: A cross-cultural empirical test of the face negotiation theory. Communication Research, 30, 599-624.
Papacharissi Z. (2004). Democracy online: Civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. New Media & Society, 6, 259-283.
Park J. (2008). Linguistic politeness and face-work in computer-mediated communication, Part 1: A theoretical framework. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59, 2051-2058.
Rains S. A. (2013). The nature of psychological reactance revisited: A meta-analytic review. Human Communication Research, 39, 47-73.
Rancer A. S., Avtgis T. A. (2006). Argumentative and aggressive communication: Theory, research, and application. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Reeves B., Nass C. (1996). The media equation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Shapiro M. (1994). Think-aloud and thought-list procedures in investigating mental processes. In Lang A. (Ed.), Measuring psychological responses to media (pp. 1-14). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Shapiro M., Chock T. M. (2004). Media dependency and perceived reality of fiction and news. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 48, 675-695.
Tabachnick B. G., Fidell L. S. (2007). Using multivariate statistics. New York, NY: Pearson.
Ting-Toomey S. (2005). The matrix of face: An updated face-negotiation theory. In Gudykunst W. B. (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication (pp. 71-92). Thousand Oaks: CA: Sage. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=E12VSljBmvAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage
Ting-Toomey S., Kurogi A. (1998). Facework competence in intercultural conflict: An updated face-negotiation theory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 22, 187-225.
Vangelisti A. L. (1994). Messages that hurt. In Cupach W. R., Spitzberg B. H. (Eds.), The dark side of interpersonal communication (pp. 53-82). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Watson C., Clark L. A., Tellegen A. (1988). Development and measurement of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063-1070.
Williams K. D., Cheung C. K. T., Choi W. (2000). Cyberostracism: Effects of being ignored over the Internet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 748-762.
Williams K. D., Forgas J. P., von Hippel W. (Eds.). (2005). The social outcast. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Wilson S. R., Aleman C. G., Leatham G. B. (1998). Identity implications of influence goals: A revised analysis of face-threatening acts and application to seeking compliance with same-sex friends. Human Communication Research, 25, 64-96.
Zajonc R.B. (1984). On the primacy of affect. American Psychologist, 39(2), 117-123.
Biographies
Gina Masullo Chen (PhD, Syracuse University) is an assistant professor of journalism at The University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Mass Communication and Journalism, Hattiesburg. Her research is focused on online engagement and its darker side—aversive virtual communication.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: November 12, 2013
Issue published: August 2015
Keywords
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Article usage*
Total views and downloads: 6468
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 18 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 30
-
Labor for community on Facebook
-
Two phenomena behind the terminology of face
-
How Contextual Features Shape Incivility Over Time: An Analysis of the...
-
The influence of the deliberative quality of user comments on the numb...
-
How Academic Mothers Experience Face Threatening Acts and Reinforcing ...
-
Children’s Politeness in Digital Era
-
The Impact of Giving Feedback in Online Discussions
-
References
-
Different Neural Responses for Unfinished Sentence as a Conventional I...
-
Dancing with Ambiguity Online: When Our Online Actions Cause Confusion
-
Does the Internet Make the World Worse? Depression, Aggression and Pol...
-
“I will defend your right to free speech, provided I agree with you”: ...
-
Brand conversation: Linguistic practices on social media in the light ...
-
La conversation de marque : pratiques linguistiques sur les médias soc...
-
The role of identification in soliciting social support in online comm...
-
Live tweeting live debates: How Twitter reflects and refracts the US p...
-
Mulmige Gefühle und unheimliche Produkte und Dienstleistungen
-
“But we still try”: affective labor in the corporate mommy blog
-
That tagging was annoying: An extension of expectancy violation theory...
-
Learning from History to Increase Positive Public Reception and Social...
-
A profile of arguing behaviors on Facebook
-
Your post is embarrassing me: Face threats, identity, and the audience...
-
“Get fit!” – The use of imperatives in Australian English gym advertis...
-
Online Political Discourse: Exploring Differences in Effects of Civil ...
-
Nasty Talk Online
-
Incivility and Speaking Out
-
Testing the “Defensive Effect”
-
Responding to the 98%: face-enhancing strategies for dealing with reje...
-
Entitled vengeance: A meta‐analysis relating narcissism to provoked ag...
-
Exploring differences in how men and women respond to threats to posit...
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Get access
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
loading institutional access options
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
