The Implicit Traits Of Envy: Theories And Experiments

People are often unwilling to confess their feelings of envy because of its sociallyundesirable nature.Despite many plausible claims for the powerful influence of envyin everyday social interactions and for its role in shaping societal norms,psychological research on envy is only in its early stages.While the development oftheory and empirical research in implicit social cognition raises a new way to studyenvy.Therefore,the dissertation was significant in both theoretical and practicalvalues.It helps to expand the filed of implicit social cognition,and systematize thestudies on negative emotion,which contributes to develop comprehensiveunderstanding of implicit emotion and its mechanism.Meanwhile,the dissertationalso provided new sights to study envy,which helps to overcome the limitations oftraditional self-reported measurement on envy.In this way,the dissertation contributesto reveal the real nature of envy and set the stage for harmonious society.The present dissertation studied envy through three parts.In part 1,the theories and empirical studies of envy were reviewed,and thencombined with the theories of implicit social cognition;the article raised a newperspective to study envy.Based on which,the article also focused on three questions.In part 2,six experiments were designed to explore the existence of implicit envy,the automatic component and control component of envy,and the relationships amongenvy,intergroup relations and self-esteem.Study 1 included two experiments,in which experiment 1 probed into the implicitenvy via direct measurement,and indirect measurement and experiment 2 furtherseparated the sensitivity and bias in signal detection theory.The results indicatedsensitivity in indirect measurement was higher than which in direct measurement,while there was no difference in bias between the direct and indirect measurement.Based on Study 1,Study 2 used two experiments to analyze the automatic component and control component of envy.Experiment 3 used process dissociationprocedure to effectively separate automatic and control component of envy,in whichcontrol component was dominative.Experiment 4 tried to explore the resource ofautomaticity.The results indicated that envy could be automatically activated,whichthen influence the subsequent behavior.Study 3 aimed at exploring the underlying mechanism of envy by probing into howenvy influences the intergroup relation.Experiment 5 combined self-reportedmeasures with implicit association test to study that envy potentially influence thesubjects' implicit attitude to different groups.The results showed that there was nosignificant difference in explicit attitudes,while the implicit attitude to the same groupwas more negative than to the advanced group.In order to explore the role and itsunderlying mechanism of envy in intergroup relation,the author did two relatedexperiments,which showed that envy could automatically influence the intergrouprelation and self-esteem was the mediator.In the last part,the characteristic,cultural factor and the mechanism were furtherdiscussed.After that,some limitations and new opinions were presented.