Psychological distance and negative emotion: the moderating role of social distance.

Abstract

Psychological distance has been extensively explored in social cognition and has recently been advanced in affective science. However, existing studies have primarily examined the effect of a single psychological distance on emotion, with less attention paid to the interaction effect of multiple psychological distances. Drawing on emotion appraisal theory, the present study focused on social distance to investigate how it moderates the effects of temporal and spatial distance on negative emotional feeling across four experiments. In these experiments, we manipulated social distance (self, friend, vs. stranger) alongside temporal or spatial distance, and measured participants' reported negative emotion to negative events. Results showed that social, temporal and spatial distance all directly influenced negative emotion, replicating previous findings. Importantly, temporal and spatial proximity elicited significantly greater negative emotion when negative events involved a close (vs. distant) social distance-that is, events affecting the self (Experiment 1) or a friend (Experiment 2) versus a stranger. These findings suggest that different dimensions of psychological distance jointly shape negative emotion, extending Construal Level Theory's multidimensional perspective to the affective domain and providing potential implications for emotion regulation by highlighting the importance of considering the social relevance of negative events to the individual.