M. Vliek

Vessels with Gold or Guilt: Emotional Reactions to Family Involvement Associated with Glorious or Gloomy Aspects of the Colonial Past

In two studies we examined whether forging a psychological bond with a nation’s colonization past facilitates the experience of positive and negative group-based self-conscious emotions as a function of a positive or negative manipulation of this past. Because people need to belong, we hypothesized that stronger family involvement in a nation’s colonization past (i.e. involved ancestors) evokes stronger a positive self-conscious emotions after positive descriptions of the nation’s colonizing past, and stronger negative self-conscious emotions after negative descriptions. In Study 1, we found support for these hypotheses in a real-life setting in which Dutch people actually found out whether their ancestors were involved in the colonization of Indonesia or not. In Study 2, we manipulated family involvement and valence of the past. Results offered support for the tested hypotheses. Implications of the results are discussed in relation to theories on identity and emotion.

Veiled Emotions: The Effect of Covered Faces on Emotion Perception and Attitudes

The present study explores the relative absence of expressive cues and the effect of contextual cues on the perception of emotions and its effect on attitudes. The visibility of expressive cues was manipulated by showing films displaying female targets whose faces were either fully visible, covered by a niqab, or partially visible (control condition). Targets expressed anger, shame, and happiness in the three different face conditions. Results show that perception of emotions is mainly affected by an absence of expressive cues: Covering the lower part of the face results in the perception of less happiness in happy videos and of more intense negative emotions in both happy and shame videos. This bias toward the perception of more negative emotions in covered faces mediates a negative attitude toward niqabs.