The Effects of Excuse Validation in Reducing Negative Affect

Excuse-making is a common strategy people invoke to feel better following a negative event. When excuses are advanced in public, their effectiveness may depend on whether they are validated by others. The present study was conducted to assess the emotional impact on participants of having their excuses validated by a supportive stranger in a conversation about a real life negative event, as compared to receiving no support from an attentive audience. Participants were thirty one …

…effectiveness of excuse-validation as a social support strategy in a controlled experiment. Participants discussed a real-life negative event with a supportive stranger who either validated their excuses or listened attentively without providing excuse-validation (Denton & Zarbatany, 1995) and related research on the effects of implicit (Mehlman & Snyder, 1985) and explicit (Schonbach, 1990) challenges to people's excuses, it was expected that participants whose excuses were validated would benefit more from the supportive conversation than participants whose excuses were not validated.