PERSONALITY UNDER STRESS WHO GETS ANGRY AND WHY INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE APPRAISAL AND EMOTION.pdf

UNIVERSITE DE GENEVE

FACULTE DE PSYCHOLOGIE ET

SECTION DE PSYCHOLOGIE

DES SCIENCES DE L’EDUCATION

PERSONALITY UNDER STRESS: WHO GETS ANGRY AND WHY?

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE APPRAISAL AND EMOTION

THESE

Présentée à la

Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l’éducation

de l’Université de Genève

pour obtenir le grade de

Docteur en Psychologie

par

Tanja WRANIK

(Allemagne)

THESE N° 336

GENEVE 2005

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I was very fortunate to conduct research on a topic – or should I say on topics – that I found

particularly interesting and exciting. In addition, I am grateful that I was able to conduct this

research within in a very dynamic team, the Geneva Emotion Research Group, and to have

benefited from the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation doctoral program

« Stress and emotion at work and in social relationships ». The lectures, financing, and

exchanges with researchers and participants from these two groups have helped make my

PhD process a very stimulating experience.

There are also many people I would like to thank personally. Thank you to my thesis

director, Professor Klaus Scherer, who supported my ideas, encouraged me to look into the

object of anger question, and was always helpful when my enthusiasm to understand and

measure everything got out of hand. Thank you to the members of the thesis committee,

Professors Jens Asendorpf, Phoebe Ellsworth, Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi, and Gilbert Probst, for

their very helpful comments on the first version of the document, and their willingness to

read it again as members of the jury. Thank you to Professor Norbert Semmer for accepting

to be a member of the jury and for reading this second version of the document. I look

forward to new insightful comments. Thank you to the members of the Emotion Research

Group, past and present: Professor Susanne Kaiser for introducing me to the world of

appraisal and anger and for her kind and helpful comments from the beginning; Tom

Johnston, Carien van Reekum, and Susanne Schmidt for the discussions and ideas while I

was pondering the thesis project; Didier Grandjean for his technical and statistical advice

and for the many stimulating discussions and ideas that were never put into practice due to

time constraints and working realities; Ursula Scherer for her systematic and inspiring

approach to complicated data sets; Rachel Baeriswyl-Cottin for her valuable assistance with

the French summary; Tatjana Aue, Tanja Bänziger, Elise Dan, Etienne Roesch, David

Sander, and Veronique Tran for sharing their research interests and methods with me and

allowing me to learn about emotions from so many different perspectives. And of course

Patricia Garcia-Prieto Chevalier and Céline Jouffray (the honorary Emotion Research Group

member), who were not only helpful with research problems, but perhaps most important,

kept me sane throughout the PhD process with their understanding, support, and friendship.

Within the FNRS-funded doctoral program, I was fortunate to have met young researchers

from other teams in Switzerland, and would especially like to thank Simone Grebner, Nicola

Jacobshagen, and Peter Wilhelm for the many interesting discussions. Finally, I had the

opportunity to collaborate with two other research groups. Thank you to Professor Susan

Schneider and Erwan Bellard for the possibility to work in the Human Resource Department

and to keep in touch with the applied contexts of psychology research until this day. Thank

you to Professor Guido Gendolla, who warmly accepted me into his Applied Motivation,

Personality, and Learning Group and to work with Kerstin Brinkman, Michael Richter,

Ralph Schmidt, and Professor Rex Wright.

The work-life balance has been a tricky one to keep, and I wish to thank my parents, Peter

and Ursula Wranik, for having supported my early academic pursuits at Bucknell

University; an experience that shaped my thinking and interests and probably led to the

desire to pursue this PhD research. Thank you to my brother, Bernd Wranik, and my friends,

who had to put up with my endless talk of the thesis and probably wondered what I was

doing all these years. Most of all, however, I wish to thank my husband, Michel Odehnal,

who not only encouraged me to return to university for my PhD, but also put up with all the

highs and lows, the many working weekends, and the too few vacations. His computer and

technical expertise helped out of several difficult situations and our discussions always put

what I was doing into perspective and to think out of the box. For all the wonderful years we

have shared, this thesis is as much your work as it is mine, and I therefore dedicate it to you

- together with all my love.

Abstract

Anger is one of the most powerful human emotions and has generally been associated with

adverse social, psychological, and physical consequences. In addition, past research has

shown that some types of persons are more likely to experience, report, or express anger

than others. However, it remains unclear why some individuals report anger more frequently

than others in certain types of situations, such as workplace stress and conflict. Cognitive

appraisal theorists generally agree that anger is related to evaluations of high goal relevance,

obstruction of an important goal, and blame. We conducted three experiments in a carefully

designed emotion induction procedure of potential workplace conflict, a dyadic social

intelligence test , and examined if a particular individual difference variable, explanatory

style , would systematically influence cognitive evaluations related to causal attribution and

blame. We predicted that individuals who generally attribute causality of negative situations

externally (Externals) would be more likely to blame the partner for poor performance in the

test and to report anger than those who generally attribute causality of negative situations

internally (Internals). Although we found that Externals were more likely to blame the

partner than Internals, we also found that Internals reported more anger than Externals.

However, anger reported by Internals was primarily directed at the self, whereas anger

reported by Externals was often directed at the interaction partner. Other results suggest that

blaming may be an emotion regulation strategy. Question related to the object of anger are

examined in detail, and the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for

appraisal theories of emotion and organizational psychology are discussed.

Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION AND REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE............................................. 7

1.1 Introduction and overview....................................................................................... 7

1.2 Emotions................................................................................................................ 10

1.2.1 Appraisal theories of emotion ....................................................................... 10

1.2.2 Anger ............................................................................................................. 13

1.2.3 Causal attribution and emotion...................................................................... 18

1.2.4 Cognitive appraisal and causal attribution – a debate ................................... 20

1.3 Personality ............................................................................................................. 22

1.3.1 Individual differences in appraisal and anger................................................ 26

1.3.2 Individual differences in causal attribution and blaming .............................. 30

1.3.3 Explanatory style in depression and optimism research................................ 33

1.3.4 Individual differences in attribution and the effect on emotion .................... 36

1.4 Summary and discussion ....................................................................................... 36

1.5 General research questions .................................................................................... 37

1.6 Overview of the present research .......................................................................... 39

2 EMOTION INDUCTION METHOD and GENERAL PROCEDURE ........................... 43

2.1 Overview ............................................................................................................... 43

2.2 Method................................................................................................................... 45

2.2.1 General procedure ......................................................................................... 46

2.2.2 Measures........................................................................................................ 54

2.2.3 Level of analysis............................................................................................ 58

2.3 Conclusion............................................................................................................. 59

3 FIRST EXPERIMENT ................................................................................................... 60

3.1 Overview ............................................................................................................... 60

3.2 Method................................................................................................................... 61

3.2.1 Recruitment and participants......................................................................... 61

3.2.2 Procedure....................................................................................................... 61

3.3 Overview of the measures and predictions............................................................ 63

3.3.1 Relationship-building questions .................................................................... 63

3.3.2 Hypotheses .................................................................................................... 64

3.4 Results ................................................................................................................... 66

3.4.1 Overview of analyses .................................................................................... 66

3.4.2 Preliminary analyses...................................................................................... 66

3.4.3 Manipulation check questions and implication ............................................. 67

3.4.4 Relationship-building paradigm .................................................................... 68

3.4.5 Testing the hypotheses .................................................................................. 69

3.5 Discussion ............................................................................................................. 85

4 SECOND EXPERIMENT .............................................................................................. 91

4.1 Overview ............................................................................................................... 91

4.2 Method................................................................................................................... 92

4.2.1 Recruitment and participants......................................................................... 92

4.2.2 Procedure....................................................................................................... 92

4.3 Overview of the measures and predictions............................................................ 93

4.3.1

Hypotheses .................................................................................................... 94

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: