Expressive Differences for Emotions in Visually Challenged and Normal Individuals

Emotions are the central part of our lives and we display our emotions toward different members of the society to manage and modify it depending on social circumstances. The present investigation wants to study the patterns of emotional displays in visually challenged and normal individuals (studying in IX & X classes) toward different target interactants in two different settings/contexts. Display Rule Assessment Inventory of Matsumoto et al. (2005) was used which asked participants “what they should do if they felt” happiness, sadness and anger toward three target interactants, i.e. parents and close friend (in-group) and teachers (out-group) in two settings – private and public. The findings indicated that both visually challenged and normal individuals endorsed expressions more toward in-group than out-group members and that too in private context. Overall expressivity for the negative emotion “anger” was least endorsed by visually challenged and “sadness” by normal individuals toward out-group member. Repeated measure ANOVA results revealed significant main effect of target interactants and settings for all the three emotions which indicate that the participants do not express their emotions in similar fashion toward different target interactants under two different settings. Significant interaction effect of the grouping of the individuals with target interactants and settings were also observed. Overall, the findings revealed that both visually challenged and normal individuals display their emotions more in private setting/context but differed to some extent in terms of magnitude of their overall expressivity for emotions, and their less endorsement for negative emotions toward out-group member indicate how individuals manage and modify their emotions to maintain social relationships.