magazine issue 1 2012 / Issue 13

Honor and Emotion

• written by Patricia M. Rodriguez Mosquera & Katie DiBona
• edited by Hans IJzerman

Honor and Emotion

Research on honor and emotion to date has focused mainly on negative emotional responses to insults. Insults are especially interesting social situations to study the emotional consequences of honor threats. Insults communicate that another person does not value or respect us. Since honor is based on the maintenance of a good social image, insults become core emotional events for those who value honor (Rodriguez Mosquera, Manstead, & Fischer, 2004). Core emotional events are situations that threaten or advance important values of an individual.

Within the general focus on insults and negative emotions, some studies have exclusively studied men and their angry or aggressive responses to masculine honor threats. For example, Cohen and collaborators have shown that White, non-Hispanic men from the Southern United States’ honor culture respond with more aggression to threats to their reputation than do their Northern counterparts (see e.g., Cohen & Nisbett, 1994; Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, & Schwarz, 1996; Vandello, Cohen, & Ranson, 2008). Furthermore, Ijzerman and colleagues have shown that Dutch males who value honor highly respond with more anger and less joy to insults compared to Dutch males who value honor less (IJzerman, van Dijk, & Galluci, 2007). In this section, we present research that has adopted a different focus. In particular, we discuss findings from studies that have examined culture and sex-differences in anger, as well as shame, in response to insults. Shame is important to honor because this emotion can be a painful reminder of our image in the eyes of others (Cooley, 1902).

Anger and shame in response to masculine and feminine honor threats

As discussed previously, biological sex seems to be a better predictor of the importance of masculine and feminine honor than cultural background. Biological sex is also a better predictor of emotional responses to threats to masculine and feminine honor. Spanish and Dutch male and female participants were presented with real-life stories that threatened core values of the masculine or the feminine honor code (Rodriguez Mosquera et al., 2002a). The threat to masculine honor story read as follows: “‘You have a partner and you are with this person in a café. Another person you do not know begins to annoy your partner. Your partner reacts quickly and before you can do anything the other person leaves. Others say to you: ‘‘You are not even capable of protecting your own partner.’’ This story described a person who is not tough and strong enough to protect a romantic partner. The feminine honor story, by contrast, threatened the feminine honor core value of sexual modesty by describing a person who is known as having different sexual partners. Participants were asked how they felt in response to the insult embedded in the stories (i.e., ‘others say to you…’).

The male participants (both Spanish and Dutch) felt angrier and more ashamed in response to the masculine honor story than the female participants did. The reverse pattern emerged for the threat to feminine honor story; female participants (both Spanish and Dutch) felt more angry and ashamed in response to this story than did male participants. It is interesting that anger and shame were strongly felt by both male and female participants. Thus, sex differences did not emerge in the intensity of anger and shame experienced among participants, but in the social situations in which these emotions were felt.