Imagine that you have been eagerly awaiting the release of a major Hollywood blockbuster film, and you are now in a long queue of excited fans, mostly teenagers, at the first show on the first night. As you are waiting, a crew from a local TV company arrives at the scene and identifies you as an important business school professor. Their camera starts rolling as they begin to interview you. One of two things might happen. Either you laugh off the encounter because you’re so thrilled with the anticipation of this movie. Or you die inside of embarrassment because you start thinking about how people might now judge you.

Perspectives play an important role in how we experience events. Whether we see ourselves as actors, as in the first scenario, or observers, as in the second, can influence the intensity of emotions we feel, according to research by Iris W. Hung and Anirban Mukhopadhyay.

They demonstrate that greater attention to the situation as in the “actor’s” perspective leads to more intense hedonic emotions such as joy, sorrow and excitement, while greater attention to the self as in the “observer’s” perspective leads to more intense self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment, pride and guilt.

“Our point of departure is the proposition that the ‘visual perspective’ people use to view a given event – whether they see themselves as actors or observers of the event – induces them to focus on different information in the situation. Actors tend to focus more on the situation, observers on the self in the situation. These perspectives therefore influence the manner in which people appraise the situation,” they said.

Their evidence for these effects came from three experiments. The first involved undergraduate students imagining it was mid-semester break and they had either gone to a party or stayed home and studied. The students were primed with either an actor’s or observer’s perspective.

Those primed as actors reported more excitement when told they had attended the party and a stronger sense of sadness when told they had chosen to study and miss out on the festivities, while the observers felt more guilt at going to the party and more pride when choosing to study.

“Since actors are more likely to attend to situational circumstances such as the temptation, choosing to indulge leads to more intense hedonic enjoyment. Observers, who are more likely to evaluate themselves from the point of view of others and make inferences about these evaluations, have more intense self-conscious emotions,” the authors said.

The second experiment was similar to the first but asked participants to recall a self-control dilemma from their past. They were also tested on emotions irrelevant to the situation to demonstrate that visual perspectives matter only to emotions typical in a given situation.

The third experiment extended the testing to a product launch event and investigated other emotions such as embarrassment and excitement. Again, visual perspectives intensified the relevant emotions.

“The visual perspectives through which individuals process information can influence the way they imagine themselves in a situation and how they appraise that situation. These perspectives can extend to retrospective and anticipated events, and thus systematically influence an individual’s emotional response to seemingly similar circumstances,” the authors concluded.