Group-based shame, guilt, and regret across cultures.

To date, there has been no systematic examination of cross-cultural differences in group-based shame, guilt, and regret following wrongdoing. Using a community sample ( = 1358), we examined people's reported experiences of shame, guilt, and regret following transgressions by themselves and by different identity groups (i.e.

When Is Humiliation More Intense? The Role of Audience Laughter and Threats to the Self.

In personal accounts, humiliation is often reported as a very intense, painful, negative emotion. We report two scenario studies in which we explored two factors that may contribute to the intense character of humiliation: (1) unwanted, negative public exposure, and (2) a threat to central aspects of one's identity. Study 1 ( = 115) assessed emotional reactions to a public insult when an audience responded with either laughter or not and when someone from the audience offered support after the insult or no support was offered.

No laughing matter: How the presence of laughing witnesses changes the perception of insults.

Insults always sting, but the context in which they are delivered can make the effects even worse. Here we test how the brain processes insults, and whether and how the neurocognitive processing of insults is changed by the presence of a laughing crowd. Event-related potentials showed that insults, compared to compliments, evoked an increase in N400 amplitude (indicating increased lexical-semantic processing) and LPP amplitude (indicating emotional processing) when presented in isolation.

Withdraw or affiliate? The role of humiliation during initiation rituals.

Initiation rituals can take different forms and empirical evidence is inconsistent as to whether these rituals promote affiliation among novices. We argue that experienced humiliation during initiations leads to less affiliation among novices, in particular when one is initiated as sole group member rather than as part of the group. We examined this hypothesis in three studies, using different paradigms.

From extreme emotions to extreme actions: explaining non-normative collective action and reconciliation.

A key argument of Dixon et al. in the target article is that prejudice reduction through intergroup contact and collective action work in opposite ways. We argue for a complementary approach focusing on extreme emotions to understand why people turn to nonnormative collective action and to understand when and under what conditions extreme emotions may influence positive effects of contact on reconciliation.