The Effect of Psychological Distance on the Experience of Joy Versus Pride

Despite the importance of positive emotions, little empirical attention has been given to factors that influence their intensity. We explored the influence of psychological distance on the experience of joy and pride. We suggest that pride involves a relatively more distant perspective than joy, and therefore, a psychologically distant perspective will lead to a less intense experience of joy than of pride. In Experiments 1a and 1b, using the Implicit Association Test, we found joy was associated with psychological proximity, whereas pride was associated with psychological distance. We then manipulated psychological distance through black-and-white versus color imagery (Experiment 2), and a third-versus first-person perspective (Experiment 3). We found that psychological distance consistently decreased the intensity of joy, whereas for pride, we found a smaller effect (Experiment 2) or no effect at all (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that psychological distance plays a different role in the regulation of joy and pride.