The Asymmetrical Effects of Valence in Affect Transfer: A Motivated Information Processing Angle

Affect researchers have long argued that the affect transfer process can be asymmetrical depending on the valence (i.e., positive vs. negative) of affect being transferred, as individuals possess a natural tendency to augment positivity and mitigate negativity (i.e., self-enhancement motive). Nevertheless, there is lack of empirical evidence supporting this theoretical speculation. Taking a motivated information processing perspective, we argue that one missing ingredient that is essential for explicating such self-enhancement based asymmetrical affect transfer is self-regulatory resource, which is a requisite for enacting self-enhancement motive during affect transfer. Further, individuals with different levels of trait self-enhancement may differ in the enactment of their self-enhancement motive during affect transfer. Hypotheses were tested with data from 155 customer service employees over 10 work days using a daily diary method. As expected, when employees were more depleted in their self-regulatory resource (i.e., high self-regulatory resource depletion), they were less capable of augmenting positivity and mitigating negativity during affect transfer when processing coworkers’ or customers’ affective displays. In addition, the trait self-enhancement acted as a boundary condition to shape the moderating effects of self-regulatory resource depletion on the relations between coworkers’ affective displays and employee affect.