Need for power and affective response to negative audience reaction to an extemporaneous speech
Introduction
The present experiment was an effort to extend David McClelland’s concept of power stress (McClelland, 1976a, McClelland, 1979, McClelland, 1982). McClelland conceived power stress as a social event that simultaneously both arouses and thwarts the power need, namely, the need to influence and create impact on others, and also to command recognition or acclaim for these power-oriented behaviors. To establish the construct validity of a hypothetical construct like power stress, the ideal strategy requires that one show a relationship between the measure of the construct and a variety of behavioral manifestations that logically derive from the construct, thereby expanding the construct’s explanatory range (Furlong, Lovelace, & Lovelace, 2000). The manner in which we operationally defined power stress was negative audience reaction to an extemporaneous speech, a discernibly different operational definition of power stress than those employed in the past. A visibly negative audience reaction to the speech, we hypothesized, would constitute a power stress for persons who scored high in power motivation. We predicted that the negative audience reaction would produce negative affect in high-power individuals both at the cognitive and physiological levels.
A power stress can occur in either of two ways (McClelland, 1979, McClelland, 1982). The first is an internal control mechanism which bottles up the anger, assertiveness, and physiological activation that the power motive mobilizes – what McClelland termed activity inhibition. The second consists of social circumstances that require strong assertive action of a magnitude that exceeds the high-power person’s capacity to deliver. For this latter form of power stress, McClelland acknowledged that the evidence was scanty at the time of his writings. In either case – internal restraint or a social event that exceeds the person’s assertive capabilities – the high-power person’s attempts at self-assertion are checked and denied expression, theoretically giving rise to harmful physiological consequences if experienced repeatedly or for sustained periods (cf. Selye, 1973, Steele, 1973).
A principal dependent variable in the present experiment consisted of electromyographic (EMG) recordings from the corrugator supercilii (frown muscles). EMG measurements detect muscle activity through non-invasive means. Prompted by the seminal studies of Cacioppo and his colleagues (Cacioppo, 1982, Cacioppo and Petty, 1981a, Cacioppo and Petty, 1981b, Cacioppo et al., 1986), EMG recordings have become a popular procedure among social psychophysiologists as a means for tracing people’s affective reactions to social stimuli. Corrugator EMG activity yields information as to how much negative affect an individual experiences when exposed to various attitude objects (Bradley, 2000). Electrical impulses come through the corrugator supercilii, and measurement of these impulses indicates the degree of unpleasantness the individual feels at a given time period. The contractions that these impulses cause are commonly undetectable as frowns by the naked eye.
Many studies have shown predicted correlations between EMG recordings from the corrugator brow muscles and negative affect (Allen et al., 1996, Cacioppo et al., 1986, Fiorito and Simons, 1994, Fodor et al., 2006, Larsen et al., 2003, McHugo et al., 1985, Tassinary et al., 1989). Fiorito and Simons (1994), for example, conducted an experiment in which participants heard scripted, tape-recorded scenes that varied along a dimension from positive to negative affective valence. The experimenter then asked that they visualize these scenes as vividly as possible, as if they were actually experiencing the event described. Positive scenes produced an increase in zygomatic (smile) activity, whereas negative scenes gave rise to a more dominant corrugator (frown) pattern. Conducting research in a similar vein, Bradley (2000) found significant contractions of the corrugator brow muscle when persons viewed pictures that were rated as unpleasant.
Section snippets
The McClelland model
The McClelland model (McClelland, 1976b, McClelland, 1985, McClelland et al., 1989) proposes that persons of varying motive dispositions (i.e., need for achievement, need for affiliation/intimacy, or need for power) differ in their responsivity to the events they encounter. Learned cues (activity incentives) signal an opportunity to engage in an emotionally reinforcing activity specific to a given motive. Should there occur a cue that is congruent with the individual’s capacity to experience
Evidence for the power stress concept
What is most necessary to test the power-stress theory, McClelland (1979) suggested, are experiments that present “strong situational challenges” (p. 189) to the power need. Using Winter’s PSE measure of power motivation (1973; Smith, 1992), Fodor, 1984, Fodor, 1985 conducted industrial simulation experiments with college students. Situational challenges took the form of a hard-to-manage work group (Fodor, 1984) and experimentally-induced conflict among “managers” that the student participant,
Power motivation and emotion
Closely integrated with McClelland’s concept of power stress is research evidence linking power motivation with emotion. McClelland et al. (1989) theorized that individuals engage in behaviors that impact the social environment in ways that link to their dominant motives, be they need for achievement, need for affiliation/intimacy, or need for power. High-power individuals, by this reasoning, should enact behaviors that create and maintain a feeling of energy and personal excitement.
Overview
We designed an experiment calculated to further explore McClelland’s power-stress concept. The form power stress assumed in this experiment was negative audience reaction to an extemporaneous speech that student participants delivered in an attempt to demonstrate that they were deserving of a $20,000 college scholarship based on their capabilities, achievements, and extracurricular activities. Although they understood that the situation was hypothetical, i.e., no scholarship was in the offing,
Participants
Participants consisted of 259 male and female students obtained through introductory psychology classes in exchange for research-participation credit toward their course grade. In small groups of 10–25 students, all completed the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) which was scored for power imagery. Mean scores for men and women were virtually identical. Students scoring in the top and bottom 27% of the need-for-power distribution qualified for the laboratory experiment. Carver and Scheier (2004)
Procedure
Participants went through the experiment one at a time. The experimenter began the laboratory session by attaching electrodes to the brow supercilii to obtain electromyographic recordings. The participant then underwent a 5-min progressive relaxation exercise to determine base rate in EMG activity (Fridlund and Cacioppo, 1986, Jacobson, 1938, Woolfolk and Richardson, 1978). The experimenter then presented the participant with written instructions on how the participant should spend 10 min
Results
The experimental manipulation was effective. Participants’ ratings of judges’ interest in their talks ranged from 1 (little interest) to 7 (much interest). Responses were as predicted to the question, “How much interest would you say the audience showed in your presentation?” The mean for the stress condition (bored judges) was 1.7 (SD = .7) and 4.2 (SD = 1.3) for the nonstress condition (mildly interested judges). The difference yielded an F value of 15.13 (p < .001, df = 1, 126). We treated the EMG
Discussion
The findings we obtained in this experiment further support McClelland’s power-stress theory. Negative audience reaction to a person’s efforts to persuade constitutes a reasonable operational definition of power stress, i.e., an event likely to thwart the power need in a power-motivated person. By both the EMG and Anxiety subscale measures, power-motivated persons gave evidence of an aversive affective response to power stress in the form we presented it to them. By neither measure did persons
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2012, Journal of Research in PersonalityCitation Excerpt :Specifically, muscle activity of the corrugator supercilii, the muscle between the eyebrows, has been shown to closely track responses to affective stimuli, increasing when negative affect is elicited and decreasing when positive affect is prevalent (Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, & Lang, 2001; Larsen, Norris, & Cacioppo, 2003). Fodor and Wick (2009) used corrugator EMG to investigate the affect-moderating role of the dispositional need for power (nPow), that is, the capacity to derive pleasure from having impact over others. They demonstrated that high-nPow people, compared to low-nPow people, respond more negatively and show more corrugator activity when they give a speech in front of an unappreciative audience which frustrates their desire to impress and thereby influence others (see also Fodor, Wick, & Hartsen, 2006).
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