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Ain’t sure who to blame: Metacognitive influences on appraisal–emotion processes

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Abstract

In this research, we propose that emotions are affected not only by appraisals, but also by a metacognitive sense of confidence versus doubt over the appraisals. Focusing on core-relational themes (CRTs), higher-order appraisals comprising the combined meaning of several appraisals, we predicted and found evidence, over two studies, that the effect of a CRT on the corresponding emotion is stronger if one feels confident about the validity of the CRT compared to feeling doubtful. In Study 1, CRT was manipulated by recall and in Study 2, CRT was manipulated in vivo. Both designs produced consistent support for the hypotheses. These findings demonstrate the need to consider metacognitive processes in understanding the effects of appraisals on emotions.

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Notes

  1. The cut-off of 2 SD is more applicable for large samples, whereas the cut-off of 3 SD or above could be too conservative. Hence, we opted for the cut-off of 2.5 SD. In both studies, there was no discernible pattern in these outliers across the variables.

  2. The written descriptions for both recall tasks have been lost. Only the quantitative data remains. The descriptions could have revealed the types of situations recalled. However, the blame descriptions were coded before they were lost, which revealed that the participants had abided by the recall instructions. All participants in the self-blame condition described negative events in which they were to be blamed. In the no self-blame condition, 38 participants recalled negative events in which another person was to be blamed, 10 recalled negative events caused by uncontrollable situational forces, and the rest reported negative events with no hints of any form of blame, but none recalled self-blame negative events. The type of blame reported tended to be clearly conveyed (e.g., self-blame: participant expressed responsibility for making comments that hurt a friend’s feelings; other-blame: participant blamed an irresponsible schoolmate for not doing his part in a project; situation-blame: participant was late for class and blamed it on the slow traffic). But these coding could no longer be independently verified. However, the manipulations have produced predicted differences in the self-blame and CRT confidence scores, suggesting that regardless of the situations recalled, they were generally effective in producing the intended states.

  3. In both studies, manipulation check analyses using tests that do not assume equality of variance produced the same results.

  4. Shame-related items were used previously to measure guilt (e.g., Ellsworth and Smith 1988), which is justified to the extent that shame shares with guilt the component of self-blame and that both are highly and positively correlated (which is the case in Study 1). The results in Study 1 remained similarly when the shame item was dropped from the guilt measure.

  5. Given the low Cronbach’s alpha, we conducted the same analyses separately on these fear items. The results were consistent with those conducted on the combined fear scores.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Eddie M. W. Tong, Alan Q. H. Teo & Dawn Y. S. Chia

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  1. Eddie M. W. Tong
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  2. Alan Q. H. Teo
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Correspondence to Eddie M. W. Tong.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 3.

Table 3 Examples of confidence (Panel A) and doubt (Panel B) feedback in Study 2
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Tong, E.M.W., Teo, A.Q.H. & Chia, D.Y.S. Ain’t sure who to blame: Metacognitive influences on appraisal–emotion processes. Motiv Emot 38, 673–686 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9405-6

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