Emotion as Social Information: Insights Into the Interpersonal Effects of Pride, Embarrassment, and Sadness

SESSION OVERVIEW All emotions arise from events that have relevancy to oneself. Certain emotions such as pride and embarrassment are particularly self-relevant, since they involve self-reflection and self-evaluation (Tangney and Tracy 2012). It is thus not surprising that a large body of research has examined the intrapersonal effects of emotions. For example, previous research has investigated the impact of pride on self-control (Wilcox, Kramer, and Sen 2011) and self-efficacy (Passyn and Sujan 2012), the antecedents underlying the self-appraisal elements of embarrassment (Dahl, Manchanda, and Argo 2001), and the impact of sadness on evaluative judgment (Schwarz and Clore 1983) and affect regulation (Andrade 2005). In addition to the intrapersonal impacts, emotion also plays a central role in our interpersonal life (Fisher and Manstead 2008; Van Kleef 2010). However, the interpersonal effects of emotions, particularly those self-conscious emotions (e.g., pride), have received little attention in consumer research. In an attempt to advance our understanding of the interpersonal effects of emotion, this session brings together four papers, which particularly focus on pride, embarrassment, and sadness, to provide insights into how these emotions influence consumers’ interpersonal encounters. Specifically, this session investigates the following questions: How would pride influence consumers’ tendency to conform to others? How would embarrassment impact consumers’ impression management concerns in a social setting? How would taking other’s perspective affect consumers’ embarrassment avoidant behaviors? How would sadness influence consumers’ reactions towards interpersonal persuasions? In the first paper, Huang, Dong, and Mukhopadhyay investigate the impact of pride on consumers’ conformity behavior. They show that pride can either increase or decrease conformity depending on lay theories of achievement (entity/incremental). Specifically, those who attribute achievement to personal traits (entity theorists) are less likely to conform than those who attribute achievement to effort (incremental theorists). In the second paper, Huang, Wang, and Zhu examine the effect of embarrassment on consumers’ impression management concerns in product selection and donation behavior. They show that when feeling embarrassed, consumers demonstrate behaviors to create a positive self-impression and at the same time to be consistent with their agentic-communal orientations. In the third paper, Rossi and Scott also explore embarrassment by focusing on how taking other’s perspective influences embarrassment-avoidant behavior. They suggest that perspective-taking prompts consumers to engage in less embarrassment-avoidant behavior. But this only occurs for consumers with high public selfconsciousness. In the fourth paper, Coleman and Williams investigate the impact of sadness on consumers’ reactions to interpersonal persuasion. They show that consumers are naturally suspicious of sad (vs. happy) appeals by engaging in emotion regulation. This effect could be strengthened when persuasion knowledge is made accessible. We believe that this session will appeal to a wide audience at ACR. There has been a limited understanding on emotions, particularly those self-conscious emotions, in an interpersonal setting. This session advances the literature by investigating certain important yet less studied emotions that range from cognitively differentiated affects (e.g., pride and embarrassment) to more global affects (e.g., sadness) , and by providing insights into how each emotion may affect consumers’ interpersonal behaviors (e.g., conformity, donation). Twelve studies were included in total with three studies in each paper. Also, this session echoes the conference mission of making a difference by reinventing established perspectives in theory and by providing socially impactful insights in practice.