189B. Not Quite the Best: Do Bronze and Silver Medalists Express Mixed Emotions?

Lead Presenter(s)

Jessica Martin

Abstract or Description

Jessica F. Martin, Andrew T. Langbehn, and Jeff T. Larsen.

There is debate in psychology about whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. However, all evidence for mixed emotions has come from self reports of emotion, which raises some concerns. For example, people might report what they believe the researchers want to hear (Larsen & McGraw, 2014). To avoid self reports, we turned to facial expressions of emotion in Olympic medalists. Previous studies indicate that bronze and silver medalists express less happiness than gold medalists. In laboratory experiments, participants have reported feeling both good and bad when games turned out well but could have turned out better. Taken together, these results raise the possibility that bronze and silver medalists may express mixed emotions of happiness and sadness. To address this possibility, we showed participants photos of Olympic medalists’ faces on the podium and asked them to rate how much positive and negative emotion the medalists expressed. As expected, bronze and silver medalists expressed less positive emotion than gold medalists. Further, silver medalists expressed more negative emotion than gold medalists. However, individual bronze and silver medalists expressed no more mixed emotions than did gold medalists. Thus, evidence for the existence of mixed emotions remains limited to self-reports.

Mentor

Jeff Larsen