A growing body of research on reframing effects has shown a robust negativity bias among U.S. participants: In many circumstances, people's attitudes change less when framing switches from negative to positive than when it switches from positive to negative. Here, we test the generalizability of this effect beyond a narrow U.S. context, exploring whether similar results would emerge with Arab university students holding a variety of nationalities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Participants considered a cognitive training regimen scenario that was first presented in negative or positive terms, then reframed in the opposing way. They reported their attitudes toward the cognitive regimen after the initial frame, and again after reframing, then completed a trend reversal task. Suggesting that effects extend beyond narrow U.S. samples, Arab university students in the UAE showed similar single-shot and sequential framing effects as multiple samples of U.S. American participants, in spite of the fact that they showed different patterns of cognitive thought related to trend reversal. By advancing emerging priorities in social-cognitive research and following best practices in replications and cross-cultural research, this work helps better calibrate the size and generalizability of negativity bias in sequential framing while increasing representation in social-cognitive research.

Emotions are linked to wide sets of action tendencies, and it can be difficult to predict which specific action tendency will be motivated or indulged in response to individual experiences of emotion. Building on a functional perspective of emotion, we investigate whether anger and shame connect to different behavioral intentions in dignity, face, and honor cultures. Using simple animations that showed perpetrators taking resources from victims, we conducted two studies across eleven countries investigating the extent to which participants expected victims to feel anger and shame, how they thought victims should respond to such violations, and how expectations of emotions were affected by enacted behavior. Across cultures, anger was associated with desires to reclaim resources or alert others to the violation. In face and honor cultures, but not dignity cultures, shame was associated with the desire for aggressive retaliation. However, we found that when victims indulged motivationally-relevant behavior, expected anger and shame were reduced, and satisfaction increased, in similar ways across cultures. Results suggest similarities and differences in expectations of how emotions functionally elicit behavioral responses across cultures.