Psychology Commons^™

Making The Most Of People We Do Not Like: Capitalizing On Negative Feedback, Christopher Edward Anderson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Capitalization was first articulated by Langston (1994) to describe how individuals increase their own positivity by sharing good news with others. This study tests the idea that sometimes people share positive news with others they do not like in an attempt to savor their dissatisfaction with shared accomplishments. A fully crossed randomized 2 X 2 experiment was used to set an initial impression (positive or negative) followed by an interview procedure where the participants would disclose some recent positive event and the confederate interviewer would provide feedback (positive or negative). This procedure was used to test capitalization processes in a …