The Emotional Side of Paternalism: Do People Share What They Feel?

We were interested in the kind of emotions felt and socially shared after experiencing paternalism (when A acts toward B with a fatherlike attitude) or blatant hostility. Participants had to read either a paternalist, hostile or factual version of the welcome speech of their new boss. They then were asked to write a text about how this day was going (social sharing measure). The results revealed that being the target of paternalism or hostility is an emotional episode which leads to social sharing of emotion. Hostility is a clearly negative episode, leading to negative social sharing. Paternalism is more ambiguous. Participants felt positive emotions (except for distrust) but they shared both positive and negative ones. Paternalism can be perceived as positive but seems to lead to negative outcomes. Our further step would be to test its negative effects on performance (reading span test).