I feel our pain: Antecedents and consequences of emotional self-stereotyping

According to Intergroup Emotions Theory people categorized as group members experience the emotions of their ingroup as a consequence of that membership. Four experiments showed that participants converged toward what they believed to be their specific ingroup’s distinct emotional experience when reporting emotions as group members, but not when reporting emotions as individuals. Such self-stereotyping of ingroup emotions occurred for an experimentally fabricated ingroup as well as a range of naturally occurring groups. Demonstrating the roots of this process in categorization, self-stereotyping was increased when motivations to affiliate were amplified and was moderated by ingroup identification. The adoption of ingroup emotions changed participants’ cognitive processing in a predictable way, demonstrating that emotional self-stereotyping involved the experience rather than merely the expression of group-based emotions. Self-stereotyping of ingroup emotions is thus one mechanism by which group-based emotions are shared and can be changed.