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The outcome of the 2020 U.S. election between Trump and Biden evoked strong emotions. In U.S. American (Study 1; N  = 405) and German (Study 2; N  = 123) samples, we investigated how observers' group membership (i.e. political orientation) and the social rank attainment of both candidates (i.e. dominance vs. prestige) predicted emotional reactions. Trump was generally perceived as more dominant, and Biden as more prestigious. However, perceptions of social rank attainment differed depending on the observers' political orientation, either matching or not matching with the leaders (i.e. Republicans and Democrats, respectively). The candidate who did not share the participants' political orientation was perceived as less prestigious and more dominant and elicited stronger contrastive emotions (i.e. schadenfreude, malicious envy) and weaker assimilative emotions (i.e. happy-for-ness, sympathy, anger), and vice versa. Crucially, dominance and prestige perceptions explained variance in the emotional reactions of more conservative and more liberal participants. Prestige positively predicted assimilative emotions and dominance contrastive emotions. Our work advances theorising by providing evidence that dominance and prestige perceptions contribute to the elicitation of various emotions. Furthermore, it suggests that prestige and dominance are not fixed characteristics of liberal and conservative leaders but depend on the observers' group membership.

Previous negotiation research predominantly focused on psychological factors that lead to suboptimal compromises as opposed to integrative agreements. Few studies systematically analyzed factors that impact the emergence of hurtful partial impasses (i.e., nonagreements on part of the issues). The present research investigates negotiators' egoistic motivation as a determinant for the emergence of partial impasses. In addition, the authors seek to demonstrate that perspective taking serves as a powerful tool to avoid impasses and to overcome egoistic impediments. Specifically, it was predicted that within an integrative context perspective-takers succeed to exchange concessions on low- versus high-preference issues (i.e., logroll), thereby increasing their individual profits without inflicting hurtful losses upon their counterparts. Three studies were conducted to test these predictions. Study 1 reveals that whereas negotiators' egoistic motivation increases the risk of partial impasses, perspective taking alleviates this risk. Study 2 demonstrates that this beneficial effect of a perspective-taking mindset is limited to integrative negotiations and does not emerge in a distributive context, in which negotiators are constrained to achieve selfish goals by inflicting hurtful losses on their counterparts. Study 3 confirms the assumption that in an integrative context egoistic perspective-takers overcome the risk of impasses by means of logrolling. The findings of the present studies are discussed with respect to their contribution to research on negotiations, social motivation, and perspective taking., (2011 APA, all rights reserved)