The effect of “being moved to tears” statements on impression formation

Abstract

This study examined people’s impressions of individuals who are emotionally moved and crying. Participants were required to read behavioral descriptions of a person and indicate their impression rating and intention to approach him. The descriptions outlined the person’s activities on a given day and were largely neutral, but with two patterns of sentence endings. Participants read only one description with either of the two endings. In the given behavioral description, a person had seen a movie about love and was either moved to tears or merely thought that it was a good story. The results revealed that the experimental manipulation and the value orientation of love did not affect impression ratings. However, participants with a higher value orientation had a higher intention to have a close relationship with the person who was moved and cried than those with a lower value orientation. These results suggest that people with similar orientations toward a value tend to want close relationships with those who are moved and cry regarding the same value.