Emotional Self-stereotyping And The Empirical Researches

Emotional self-stereotyping is the process which individuals'emotions converge towards their in-groups'emotion prototypes when they categorize as group members and identify their groups, experiencing their group-level emotions changed, which leads to emotion sharing among group members. Emotional self-stereotyping is not only occurred on external language expression, and it is a internal emotional experience changed process that individual internalizes the group emotion prototype to his own group-level emotion.In this study, we used the method of experiment in order to check these hypotheses: group-level emotions are distinct from the same person's individual-level emotions, emotional self-stereotyping is occurred on group-level emotion, showing emotion specificity, emotional self-stereotyping influences the group identification.The findings have confirmed these research hypotheses well, the conclusion of this study to be as follows:⑴Although group and individual ratings of the same emotion tended to overlap, group-level emotions are distinct from the same person's individual-level emotions. There are positive relations between positive group-level emotions and group identification, and negative relations between negative group-level emotions and group identification.⑵Emotional self-stereotyping is occurred on group-level emotion, showing emotion specificity, which means that when activate group identity, individual's consistent group-level emotion will be changed towards the group's provided emotion prototype.⑶The occurring of emotional self-stereotyping influences individual's group identification. Identification increases with happiness towards the in-group or anger towards the out-group, whereas identification decreases with anger toward the in-group and happiness toward the out-group.