The Role of Cognitive Appraisals in Emotional Blunting - Projects at ...

Winterich et al. 15penalty than they otherwise would. Alternatively, the prosecutorcould elicit anger in the jury, which could subsequently preventthe jury from feeling sadness and acknowledging thesituational factors associated with the case. This blunted sadnesscould thereby cause the jury to wrongfully condemn aninnocent person for a crime. In this context, the order inwhich the prosecutor and defendant present evidence, questionwitnesses, and make opening and closing statementscould have far-reaching implications.It appears, therefore, that understanding the psychologicalmechanisms of emotional blunting should aid in understandingjudgments and decisions in a variety of emotionaldomains. The need to understand such processes is made allthe more pressing by the fact that most people are unawareof them. As our posttest on lay intuition clarified, people notonly lack awareness of these effects but also deny their verypossibility.ConclusionSadness and anger are characterized by contrasting agencyappraisals. As a result of these differences, people find thatonce they are sad, it is hard for them to be mad, and viceversa. We call this phenomenon emotional blunting.Because individuals experience a myriad of emotionelicitingsituations throughout a single day, the effects ofcontrasting appraisal tendencies may be manifold; the presentstudies demonstrated, for example, that emotional bluntingcarries over to influence optimistic risk estimates andpunitive attributions. Additional research is needed tounderstand emotion-specific transitions and their potentiallyprofound impact on both experienced emotion andjudgments.AcknowledgmentsWe gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from Phoebe Ellsworth,Eddie Tong, Yoel Inbar, Katherine Shonk, Paul Litvak, NylaBranscombe, Diederik Stapel, and two anonymous reviewers. Wealso gratefully acknowledge outstanding administrative supportfrom Nicole Otchy.Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respectto the authorship and/or publication of this article. [AQ: 2]FundingThe authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support forthe research and/or authorship of this article: Grants from theKatz Graduate School of Business of the University of Pittsburgh(PI Winterich) and the National Science Foundation (PECASESES0239637, SES0820441; PI Lerner) supported this research.The resources of the Jeffrey S. Conant Behavioral Research Laboratoryat the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University facilitateddata collected in Studies 2 and 3. [AQ: 3]Notes1. We recognize that augmentation, instead of blunting, couldoccur under certain circumstances, but exploring emotionalaugmentation is beyond the scope of this article because ofspace constraints.2. Although emotions often arise from cognitive appraisals,research has found that emotions can be elicited in the absenceof cognition. For instance, bodily feedback or unconsciouspriming can result in emotional experiences without cognitiveappraisals (Berkowitz & Harmon-Jones, 2004; Keltner,Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993). Importantly, the appraisals associatedwith the emotion will still be elicited when the emotionis experienced, which will result in judgments influenced bythe appraisal tendencies (Lerner & Tiedens, 2006). See Figure 1for an illustration.3. Branscombe (1985) demonstrated that watching a positively(negatively) valenced film followed immediately by a secondfilm of negative (positive) valence reduced the magnitude ofthe negative (positive) emotion experience relative to individualswho first watched either a negatively valenced film or nofilm (control condition). Consistent with Branscombe’s findings,Neumann, Seibt, and Strack (2001) found that individualsin a negatively valenced state subsequently experienced lesspride and less amusement than did those who were initially in apositively valenced state or a neutral state (control condition).4. We appreciate the review team’s suggestion that behavioralapproach and inhibition systems may influence emotionalblunting.5. We thank the anonymous reviewers and Phoebe Ellsworth forsuggesting that we test the bidirectionality of the emotionalblunting hypothesis in a single study.6. Including baseline reports of anger and sadness does not changethe pattern of the results, such that the hypothesized effectsremain when they are excluded from the analysis. However,controlling for baseline emotions does strengthen some of thehypothesized effects. Given our theorizing on the impact of currentemotional experience on subsequent emotional experience,it is important to account for baseline emotions when possible.7. For completeness, we conducted regression analyses for selfreportedsadness, disgust, fear, and happiness after the subsequentemotion experience. We did not hypothesize that emotioninduction and behavioral approach system (BAS) Drive wouldinfluence subsequent emotion experiences other than anger.However, if emotional blunting occurred based on contrastingagency appraisals, disgust could also be blunted by sadnessbecause of its similarity to anger as characterized by humanagencyappraisals (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). Indeed, resultsindicated that the interaction between anger and BAS Drivepredicted disgust, β .35 (.58), t 2.71, p .05. At low levelsof BAS Drive, sadness condition participants reported less disgustthan anger condition participants following the subsequentanger treatment, β –.53 (.86), t –2.72, p .05. This resultfor the emotional blunting of disgust, similar to that of anger,