A common arousal state follows from any meaning violation and drives compensatory affirmation.

Evidence

There is good reason to believe that the arousal state posited by so many for so long is no phantom. For example, Mendes et al. (2007) found that a cardiovascular “threat response” following from experiences of personal discrimination also follows from innocuous violations of expectation, such as conversing with a Chinese experimenter who speaks with a pronounced Alabama accent. In other studies, analogous reports of conscious negative arousal followed from the violation of committed beliefs, even if the violation represents good news for the participant (Plaks & Stecher, 2007). Many studies identify modes of neurocognitive arousal that follow from different expectancy violations, both in adults (Inzlicht et al., 2009) and children (Zelazo, 2009). Even if participants merely recall this feeling (Van den Bos, 2001), they engage in compensatory affirmation efforts of the same kind and magnitude as those that follow from meaning threats themselves (e.g., mortality salience prime). — Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs, When Is the Unfamiliar the Uncanny?…, 90

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s core question: intergroup/identity threat (Mendes’s discrimination paradigm) and innocuous expectancy violation (Alabama accent) trigger the same cardiovascular threat response, suggesting group-boundary defense is a special case of broader meaning maintenance. — connects to: Costly emotions like guilt persist because they confer compensating communicative gains — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 619; The source of disapproval reverses who feels most collective guilt — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 721; Recognizing behavior-ideal gaps triggers compunction that motivates prejudice change.
• QUESTION: Whether recall of past meaning-threat arousal alone fully substitutes for an actual violation, and whether misattribution extinguishing that effect is methodologically parallel across threat paradigms.

Related

• Costly emotions like guilt persist because they confer compensating communicative gains (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The source of disapproval reverses who feels most collective guilt #qualifies (0.80) — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 721
• Costly emotions like guilt persist because they confer compensating communicative gains #complicates (0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 619
• Recognizing behavior-ideal gaps triggers compunction that motivates prejudice change. #exemplifies (0.72)