I like it because it hurts you: On the association of everyday sadism, sadistic pleasure, and victim blaming.

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals' just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others' suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others' suffering-individuals high in everyday sadism-engage in victim blaming due to increased sadistic pleasure and reduced empathic concern they experience. Results of three cross-sectional studies and one ambulatory assessment study applying online experience sampling method (ESM; overall N = 2,653) document this association. Importantly, the relation emerged over and above the honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness personality model (Study 1a), and other so-called dark traits (Study 1b), across different cultural backgrounds (Study 1c), and also when sampling from a population of individuals frequently confronted with victim-perpetrator constellations: police officers (Study 1d). Studies 2 and 3 highlight a significant behavioral correlate of victim blaming. Everyday sadism is related to reduced willingness to engage in effortful cognitive activity as individuals high (vs. low) in everyday sadism recall less information regarding victim-perpetrator constellations of sexual assault. Results obtained in the ESM study (Study 4) indicate that the relation of everyday sadism, sadistic pleasure, and victim blaming holds in everyday life and is not significantly moderated by interpersonal closeness to the blamed victim or impactfulness of the incident. Overall, the present article extends our understanding of what determines innocent victims' derogation and highlights emotional mechanisms, societal relevance, and generalizability of the observed associations beyond the laboratory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

On the social signal function of emotional crying: Broadening the perspective to social interactions in daily life.

Emotional crying is a potent signal that can influence how social interactions unfold. Although the social signal function of crying has been mostly studied in experimental approaches involving hypothetical scenarios with strangers as targets, we propose that daily social interactions should be considered to address aspects of external validity. We conducted three retrospective studies (total N = 2,277; convenience samples; Studies 2 and 3 were preregistered; data were collected in 2022 and 2023) and found that individuals primarily observed close others crying in their daily lives; a boundary condition that was hardly reflected in former studies. Crying episodes were typically characterized by tears and changes in facial expression, vocalizations, and gestures, whereas isolated emotional tears, were rarely reported. Participants indicated that they frequently helped close others, but that helping strangers was the exception. The level of familiarity with the target also influenced the form of help provided. Furthermore, the crying person was rated as less warm and less competent when crying (vs. in general or in a neutral situation). Additional analyses suggest that question order effects and recall biases are no plausible alternative explanations of our findings. Taken together, these results call into question the validity of the experimental approaches used in this line of research. We discuss strategies for future study of the social signal function of crying in nonhypothetical scenarios with reference to the "generalizability crisis" of psychological science. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).