Fair View Of The World The Buffering Effect Of Negative Emotions

"the belief in a just world"and just world theory were formally described by Melvin Lerner in 1980, psychologists have made so many progress in the researches of just world theory. In the introduction part, the basic theories and conceptions about the belief in a just world were first reviewed. And some recent laboratorial researches were introduced, which were about the function of a belief in a just world and alternative strategies for maintaining a belief in a just world. Although the belief in a just world influencing on people's emotional responses have become a research focus in researchers'eyes, some questions were still found in recent research studies.Therefore, we proposed to limit the recalling grade that arose subjects'different emotional responses, which ensured it was not justice bias between the recalling grades, and modify experiment procedure to explore the relation between beliefs in a just world and emotional responses to negative outcomes.In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to recall the grade of their own first College English Test, which was compared with the one they expected, to arise their different emotional responses after they completed the Just World Scale. We investigated their different emotional responses and asked them to make a causal attribution for their grades. To explore the relation between beliefs in a just world and negative emotional responses, beliefs in a just world, negative emotional responses and attribution were compared between the low grade group whose grade was lower than expected and the high grade group whose grade was higher than expected. The result showed, personal beliefs in a just world were significantly related to negative emotion when the grade was low, and there was not this relation when the grade was high.In Experiment 2, we proposed to explore mediators of the relation between personal beliefs in a just world and negative emotional responses. Based on recent theories, we proposed that strong believers in a just world would make stronger internal and weaker external attributions for their own negative outcomes, leading to reduce perceived unfairness, which was expected to lead to less negative and more positive emotion. And mediator effect analyses showed, our data were consistent with the processes proposed above. Perceived unfairness had full mediator effect between personal beliefs in a just world and negative emotion, while attribution had partial mediator effect between personal beliefs in a just world and perceived unfairness.