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Recently, social psychology has become central in the study of morality. This turn to morality as a topic builds on social psychologists' long-standing interest in issues closely related to morality, such as cooperation, empathy, fairness, social norms and deviance. The present paper introduces a (virtual) special issue on morality by highlighting some of the 41 articles on 'moral' or 'morality' that have appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology from 1973 to the present. The nineteen highlighted papers are organized into the main topics covered in research on morality published in EJSP: Emotion, Impression Formation and Trait Inference, Norms and Deviance, Stereotypes, and Reasoning and Judgment. A description of the historical trends that characterized research on morality in EJSP is also provided. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social image, or the views that others have of us and our groups, plays a role in a wide array of psychological processes, including impression management, interpersonal relationships, mate selection, intragroup and intergroup processes, the experience and expression of emotion, gender differences in behavior, and the construction and maintenance of social status. The 13 papers included in this special issue reflect the centrality of social image in these and other social-psychological processes. Five major themes integrate this diverse selection of papers: (i) self-presentation of social image; (ii) culture-specific conceptions of social image; (iii) the role of social image in emotion; (iv) respect and status as reflections of social image; and (v) the influence of social image on ingroup and outgroup perceptions. Taken together, these papers illustrate the importance of social image for understanding the complexities of human behavior and point to new ways to study this important topic. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hedonic overconsumption is often considered to be caused by impulsive factors. The current paper investigates whether self-licensing, relying on reasons to justify subsequent gratification, can also be included as a significant contributor to hedonic consumption. Two studies were conducted to investigate whether self-licensing can account for an increase in hedonic consumption while ruling out impulsive factors such as resource depletion, negative affect, and visceral state as alternative explanations. A pilot study indicated that perceiving oneself as having invested greater effort and thus having a self-licensing cue did not lead to a decline in self-control capacity compared with not having a self-licensing cue. The main study employed the same procedure and established that having a licensing cue did lead to increased snack intake while controlling for impulsive factors. Together, these studies support the notion that self-licensing is a separate mechanism leading to hedonic gratification independent of impulsive factors. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to elucidate under what conditions victims of injustice who seek revenge feel satisfied and perceive that everybody got what he or she deserved. Two hypotheses are discussed: The comparative suffering hypothesis states that seeing the offender suffer from fate is sufficient for evoking satisfaction and perceptions of deservingness among victims. The understanding hypothesis states that revenge can only be satisfactory when the offender understands it as a response to his or her prior behavior. These hypotheses were tested in three experimental studies. The comparative suffering hypothesis received only weak support. The understanding hypothesis, on the other hand, received much stronger support: When the offender understood revenge as punishment, revenge led to satisfaction and deservingness among victims. These findings are discussed with regard to the question why people take revenge. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses methodological considerations relevant to nonverbal communication of emotion research. In order to gather more information about the interpretations given to spontaneous and dynamic facial expressions, two main objectives guide the present exploratory research. The first one is to obtain naturalistic recordings of emotional expressions in realistic settings that are ‘emotional enough’. The second one is to address the issue of dynamic judgments of facial expressions of emotion, that is real-time emotional recognition. An innovative device has been created for this specific purpose. Results show that, although the social nature of the eliciting situation is minimal, the experience of some emotions is reflected on the encoders' faces while being covertly videotaped in natural conditions. Moreover, results show the utility to investigate dynamic emotional judgments of spontaneous and dynamic expressions since observers seem to be sensitive to the slightest facial expression change in making their emotional judgments. A promising paradigm is thus proposed for the study of the dynamics of real-time nonverbal emotional interaction. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examined reactions to situations in which, although one is not personally involved, one could see oneself connected to either the perpetrators or the victims of unfair behavior. We manipulated participants' similarity and measured their identification to either one of two groups which participants later lea med was the victim or the perpetrator of harmful behavior. As predicted, making salient similarities to the victims lead participants to: 1) appraise the perpetrator's behavior as more unfair; 2) experience more anger; and 3) be more likely to take action against it and less prone to show support for it as a function of their level of identification with their salient ingroup. In sharp contrast, focusing participants' attention on their similarities to the perpetrators reversed this pattern of findings: Compared to high identifiers, low identifiers appraised the behavior as more unfair than high identifiers, which made them feel angry (and guilty) and less likely to show support for the perpetrator's behavior. The data also provide strong support for a mediational model in which appraisal of the situation colors the emotional reaction which in turn orients action tendencies. We discuss the implications of our findings for the issue of group-based emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudinal ambivalence extends the traditional unidimensional conceptualization of attitude by acknowledging that people can simultaneously evaluate attitude objects as positive and negative. The present paper argues that this bidimensional view of attitudes may be extended further to take account of multidimensional influences on attitudes using measures of belief homogeneity. Study 1 (n = 155) showed that attitudes based on homogeneous belief-sets were significantly more predictive of subsequent behaviour (β = 0.47, p<0.01) than were attitudes based on heterogeneous belief-sets (β = 0.08, ns). Study 2 (n = 136) manipulated belief homogeneity and found that when beliefs were made heterogeneous, attitudes based on heterogeneous belief-sets were significantly less predictive of behavioural intentions (β = 0.46, p < 0.01) than attitudes based on homogeneous belief-sets (β = 0.84, p < 0.01). Implications for research on attitudinal ambivalence and attribute importance are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of numerous experimental studies have provided ample evidence for William James' theory that emotional conduct is a sufficient condition for the occurrence of emotional feelings. Two further questions are addressed in the study reported in this paper. First, critics have speculated that the effects of peripheral feedback from expressive bodily movement may lead to generalized, diffuse pleasant or unpleasant experiences, rather than the specific emotional feelings consistent with James' position. Second, if the Jamesian account is correct, then the simultaneous combination of multiple, consistent sources of expressive bodily feedback should result in greater magnitudes of emotional response than those caused by separate, individual sources. The results of the present study replicate those of the only other study (Duclos et al ., 1989) which has demonstrated specific effects of expressive behaviors on corresponding emotional feelings. It was also possible to demonstrate, via correlational analyses, that those people who are responsive to their expressions tend to be responsive to their postures as well, since subjects in this study received manipulations of their facial expressions and their bodily postures. The results of this study also indicate that matching combinations of facial expressions and bodily postures result in more powerful feelings of the corresponding emotional feelings than do either expressions or postures alone. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether persons' cognitive representations of valued group identities differ in content from their representations of their personal identity. The results showed differences between participants' qualitative descriptions of their group identities and their personal identities. Values, emotions, and personal relationships were more often listed in group identity representations than in personal identity representations. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of current evidence for the role of affect in social judgments, and the work represented in this Special Issue in particular. A new integrative theory, the Affect infusion Model (AIM) is outlined as a comprehensive and parsimonious explanation of these effects. The model assumes that the degree of affect infusion into judgments varies along a processing continuum, and identifies four alternative processing strategies: (a) direct access, (b) motivated, (c) heuristic, and (d) substantive processing. Consistent with the empirical material reviewed here, the AIM predicts that judgments requiring constructive, generative processing (heuristic and substantive strategies) are more likely to be 'infused' by affect titan are simple, reconstructive judgments (direct access and motivated processing). The role of target, judge and situational features in recruiting different processing strategies is considered, and evidence supporting the model is reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an innovative investigation of commonsense conceptions of emotion using a two-person game where one player asked questions intended to determine the nature of an emotional stale imagined by the other player. All questions used by players were then sorted in to categories by expert judges. Bused on cluster analysis, questions were categorized as relating to 'causes'. characteristics, and 'consequences' of emotional states. Potential advantages and applications of this technique are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]