Personal importance as a moderator of appraisal - emotion relationships

Abstract

Past research on appraisal theories has shown that the appraisal of agency-others is associated with anger and the appraisal of agency-circumstances is associated with sadness. Research has also revealed that personal importance is vital in emotions such as anger and sadness. However, there has been no research so far on the role of personal importance as a moderator of appraisal-emotion relationships, specifically the relationship between agency-others and anger and the relationship between agency-circumstances and sadness. To fill this gap, two experiments were performed. In Experiment 1, results showed that personal importance moderated the relationship between agency-others and anger, however, the relationship between agency-circumstances and sadness did not vary as a function of personal importance. To further investigate the hypotheses, valence (positive and negative) condition was added in Experiment 2. In positive valence condition participants received a positive feedback on a task given to them whereas in negative valence condition participants received a negative feedback on the given task. In Experiment 2, participants were randomly assigned to either a positive valence condition or a negative valence condition, in comparison to Experiment 1 where participants were only assigned to the negative valence condition. In addition, personal importance was also manipulated in Experiment 2 with two conditions (i.e. high personal importance and low personal importance). Results of Experiment 2 revealed that the relationship between agency-others and anger did not vary with personal importance whereas the relationship between agency-circumstances and sadness was moderated by personal importance. However, valence did not moderate the appraisal-emotion relationships as predicted.