How do threatening locations alter people´s feelings and interactions with others in the surroundings? A psychophysiological study in the lab.
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Final Report Abstract
The environment is full of opportunities and threats. Often, they take the form of places to approach (e.g., beautiful park) and places to avoid (e.g., a crime-ridden neighborhood). Previous research has shown that threatening locations taint people’s attitude toward the surroundings nearby (i.e., assimilation effect) but boost people’s favorable attitude toward the surroundings that are located farther away (i.e., contrast effect). Threatening places have thus an “affective seesaw” effect on people’s affective perception of the surroundings. This research project asked a) whether the seesaw effect elicited by a threatening place could be found also when participants were immersed in a 3D neighborhood and when they experienced an actual threat, b) whether the seesaw effect generalized to psychophysiological indices of affect, c) whether the affective influence of the threatening place affected people’s experience of social warmth toward passers-by that were encountered in the surroundings. For this, we conducted two large laboratory experiments (Experiment 1 N=118, Experiment 2 N=254). Experiment 1 showed that the affective seesaw effect emerged for self-reported affect when the participants were immersed in a 3D neighborhood and when they actually felt threatened by the threatening location (i.e., the negative hotspot). The affective seesaw effect, however, did not emerge at the psychophysiological level. The psychophysiological indices show that people experienced more threat in the vicinity of the hotspot than farther away, but this decrease did not switch into contrast as for self-reported affect. This result suggests that the contrast effect experienced consciously is not necessarily rooted in a contrast effect at the psychophysiological level. This dissociation reminds of the common experience of awakening from a nightmare and feeling relieved while one’s body is still unpleasantly aroused. The results from Experiment 2 replicated the results from Experiment 1. In addition, they showed that differences in the spatial context did not influence the participants’ self-reported warmth toward the passersby over and above the differences in the facial emotions the passersby displayed. Despite the powerful spatial context manipulation, facial emotion displays largely trumped spatial context. Thus, smiling elicits the greatest self-reported social warmth independent of the surrounding affective context. More subtle indices of social warmth, like emotional mimicry, did depend on context to some extent, but in a somewhat unexpected fashion. As expected, participants did more consistently mimic the passers-by’s happy facial expressions in the safety condition than in the latent or manifest-threat conditions. Unexpectedly, however, participants did also mimic the passers-by’s happy facial displays close to the negative hotspot in the manifest-threat condition whereas they stopped to do so farther away. Thus, affectively congruent surroundings do not seem necessary for emotional mimicry to emerge. More specifically, happiness mimicry emerges although the level of threat in the spatial context is known to be high. The participants did not mimic the passers-by’s sad facial displays. In contrast to happiness mimicry, the fact of encountering strangers passing by in an immersive environment might not have triggered enough affiliation to elicit sadness mimicry. Relatedly, Experiment 2 provided also somewhat inconsistent evidence that higher motivation to affiliate (as indexed by self-reported warmth toward the passers-by) was related to greater levels of happiness mimicry. In a nutshell, this research project was challenging both by theoretical and methodological aspects. It succeeded in producing core results that were expected, but it also produced a substantial share of unexpected results. The results advance the theory of affective judgment in spatial context and reinforces the notion that, in such a context, emotional mimicry depends on the emotion displayed by the target and on the presence of and the distance from a negative hotspot. Overall, the results initiated new avenues of research about the relationship between people’s conscious and psychophysiological experience of affect in the spatial context, and their experience of social warmth toward social targets in that kind of context.
Publications
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(2018, June). Evaluation of people and places in spatial context [conference]. SPSSI-EASP Joint Meeting, Pittsburgh, USA
Kastendieck, T. M., Blaison, C., & Hess, U.
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(2019, June). Affective Judgment in Spatial Context: Toward a Contribution to Embedded Social Cognition. Conference of the Australasian Society for Social and Affective Neuroscience, Newcastle, Australia
Kastendieck, T. M., Blaison, C., & Hess, U.
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(2019, March). Affective Judgment in Spatial Context: Laboratory Results for Self-Report and Psychophysiological Measures. International Convention of Psychological Science, Paris, France
Kastendieck, T. M., Blaison, C., & Hess, U.
