Abstract

The influence of display rules and social norms can interfere with individuals’ abilities to express themselves, other’s abilities to acknowledge their own perceptions and empathetic responses to others in emotionally charged situations. This phenomenon creates inconsistencies in what one believes and what one can outwardly acknowledge, potentially inducing an experience of cognitive dissonance. The presence of cognitive dissonance is broadly defined by the presence of inconsistencies among thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors and is frequently studied in terms of dissonance-alleviating responses. The current study explores the potential dissonance-alleviating responses of being forced to outwardly accept a particular connotation of an image that is not inwardly perceived. Participants (n= 30) were randomly assigned to either a congruency/control condition or a non-congruency/dissonance condition. The two groups were compared post-dissonance or post-control priming based on their emotional acuteness, as measured by the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT-S). The results of an independent t-test indicate a statistically significant difference between the non-congruency/dissonance condition (M= 22.87, SD= 4.91) and the congruency/control condition (M= 27.2, SD= 3.95) on the GERT-S measure, t(28)= -2.67, p= .013, with an effect size of $\widehat{d}$ = 0.21, indicating a small effect between groups.