The Messenger Matters: Invalidating Remarks From Men Provoke a More Negative Emotional Reaction Than Do Remarks From Women

Abstract

Despite negative consequences of emotional invalidation, research has not examined the effect of gender on responses to validation or invalidation or how an invalidating comment from a male versus a female confederate may influence affective responses. We used a two-study quasi-experimental design to examine variables that influence the emotions of individuals validated or invalidated for their emotions. Male and female undergraduates received either validating or invalidating remarks from a gender-ambiguous confederate (Study 1) or invalidating remarks from either a male or female confederate (Study 2). Results showed that invalidation from a gender-ambiguous confederate produced more negative emotional reactions than validation regardless of participants’ gender. Furthermore, being invalidated by a man rather than by a woman provoked a specifically more negative emotional response. Interpersonal interventions should explore ways to reduce invalidation and particularly strive to mitigate the effects of invalidation from men, whose criticisms may provoke heightened negative responses from others.

Keywords

Invalidation emotions gender interpersonal interaction dyad

Introduction

The invalidation of emotional expressions, described by Linehan (1993) as the rejection or judgment of another’s emotions, has been proposed as a cause of emotion dysregulation (Fruzzetti, Shenk, & Hoffman, 2005) and in the etiology of disorders such as borderline personality disorder (BPD; Linehan, 1993). On the other hand, validation has been defined by Linehan (1993) as communicating that a response is understandable given the context. Validation is theorized to facilitate emotion regulation by reducing emotional reactivity (Fruzzetti & Shenk, 2008). Despite theoretical models suggesting that invalidation contributes to negative mental health outcomes and that validation is an important therapeutic tool (Linehan, 1997), limited empirical work has examined these topics.

The existing research on immediate effects of validation and invalidation has found evidence for affective, cognitive, and behavioral consequences. Although some researchers have found that invalidation, relative to validation, resulted in greater negative affect and physiological reactivity (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011), others have not (Woodberry, Gallo, & Nock, 2008). There is evidence that greater invalidation among couples is related to lower marital satisfaction and greater depressive symptoms (Leong, Cano, & Johansen, 2011) and, conversely, that validating behaviors are positively correlated with marital satisfaction and perceived spousal support (Cano, Barterion, & Heller, 2008). Furthermore, being validated following a disclosure provided more benefits in cognitive processing than not disclosing (Lepore, Fernandez-Berrocal, Ragan, & Ramos, 2004) and being invalidated (Lepore, Ragan, & Jones, 2000). Finally, invalidation has been found to lead to greater behavioral aggression relative to validation (Herr, Jones, Cohn, & Weber, 2015). Together, this research suggests that invalidation is associated with more negative outcomes and fewer positive outcomes than validation.

Linehan’s (1993) seminal work on the invalidating environment focused on consequences among women, citing sexism as an “important source of invalidation for all women in our culture” (p. 52). Indeed, women report receiving more negative feedback from others (Lundgren & Rudawsky, 1998) and are interrupted more than men (Hancock & Rubin, 2014). Given that invalidation has been implicated in the etiologies of conditions prevalent among women (e.g., BPD, Linehan, 1993; eating disorders, Mountford, Corstorphine, Tomlinson, & Waller, 2007), invalidation is a critical factor to examine in women’s health. On the other hand, the relation between invalidation and men’s emotional health remains underexamined. Given that men often fear being ridiculed for their emotional expressions (Fischer, 1993) or being perceived as gay in the company of other men (Gaia, 2013), men also face pressure to express correct emotions. In addition, men report feeling less understood and validated than do women (Grabill & Kerns, 2000), likely because emotionality is a societal norm for women but not men (Fischer, 1993). Given that men may also be punished socially for violating societal cultural gender expectations, sexism is a component of invalidation as directed toward men as well as women. Although invalidation can be expected to also have a harmful effect on men’s mental health, further research on men is needed.

Empirical studies examining validation or invalidation have been limited in their exploration of gender, in that the samples have included mostly women (Lepore et al., 2004; Woodberry et al., 2008) or controlled for gender (Herr et al., 2015). Other studies have failed to find gender effects on outcomes such as global negative affect (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011) and cognitive processing or stress (Lepore et al., 2000) from validation or invalidation. Leong et al. (2011) found within a subset of couples that more frequent invalidation communicated by both partners was associated with higher depressive symptoms in husbands specifically, suggesting that invalidation can impair men’s mental health. Although Leong et al.’s (2011) exploration of gender is intriguing, their examination was within couples, which makes it difficult to disentangle the effects of the relationship from the validation and invalidation. The use of differing methodologies and conflicting findings underscores the importance of further research.

Study 1

The only study that evaluated whether gender might moderate affective responses to validation and invalidation (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011) measured global negative affect and not specific emotions. However, emotions have gendered associations; for instance, women often endorse sadness and guilt more frequently than do men (Brody & Hall, 1993; Chaplin, 2015; Chaplin & Aldao, 2013; Stapley & Haviland, 1989), while men tend to score higher in contempt or anger relative to women (Brody & Hall, 1993; Chaplin, 2015; Chaplin & Aldao, 2013; Stapley & Haviland, 1989). Given that these emotions will not be detected with a general measure of negative affect, assessing for specific affective reactions is a critical extension of past research.

Study 1 examined whether participants’ gender moderates affective responses to a written validating or invalidating statement from a peer confederate of undisclosed gender. While past studies have implemented a verbal validation or invalidation using either scripts (Herr et al., 2015) or a coded conversation (Lepore et al., 2000, 2004; Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011), this study explored a novel manipulation by delivering a written validating or invalidating response from a gender-ambiguous confederate to standardize confederate characteristics. Given the negative impact of chronic invalidation and the potential therapeutic benefits of validation, standardizing characteristics of the confederate is critical to isolate the impact of the invalidating or validating message on subsequent affective experience. To examine the potential for more nuanced emotional responding, Study 1 also examined the effect of validation and invalidation on specific affective responses and extended the literature by assessing liking of the confederate. Importantly, this investigation recognizes the importance of exploring gender as nested within the social context as a departure from research examining purely dispositional gender differences (see Yoder & Kahn, 2003). We extended prior work exploring gendered emotional experience by delving into specific social contexts (in this case, validation and invalidation), which might accentuate or diminish gender effects found in prior research.

Given that invalidation can lead to increased negative affect (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011), we predicted that an invalidating statement would produce more negative affect than a validating statement regardless of participants’ gender. However, given interest in lower order affective responses, we explored components of negative affect in the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule-Expanded Form (PANAS-X; Watson & Clark, 1994), specifically hostility, guilt, and sadness. The only negative affect component we excluded was fear, which was not thought to be relevant to this examination. Two additional PANAS-X subscales of interest, serenity and surprise, were also included. Because invalidation has resulted in increased aggressive behavior (Herr et al., 2015), invalidation was predicted to increase hostility relative to validation. Although no empirical research has examined how invalidation relative to validation specifically predicts other lower order affective experiences, we predicted that, along with negative affect, invalidation would produce more sadness and guilt, more surprise, and less serenity than validation. Because of existing research showing that participants rated a validating confederate as more empathic and friendlier than a confederate who challenged their disclosure (Lepore et al., 2004), we predicted that an invalidating confederate would be liked less and perceived as less supportive than a validating confederate.

In line with research regarding which emotions are more common (Brody & Hall, 1993; Chaplin, 2015; Chaplin & Aldao, 2013; Stapley & Haviland, 1989) and more expected (Fischer, 1993; Grossman & Wood, 1993; Timmers, Fischer, & Manstead, 2003) for men and women, we predicted that the effects of validation and invalidation would be moderated by gender, with men endorsing more hostility following an invalidating comment than women. In addition, women were expected to endorse more sadness and guilt following the invalidating statement than were men. Given that women have been found to process supportive situations more deeply and discriminate more sharply between different supportive responses than do men (Burleson et al., 2009), women were expected to endorse less liking of the confederate and perceive the confederate as less supportive than men. Because the gender and emotion research reviewed earlier explored broader emotional reactions for men and women, we were interested specifically in how the experience of being validated or invalidated might moderate expected gender effects.

Method

Participants

Participants were 64 undergraduate students at a private university in the mid-Atlantic Unites States who completed the study in exchange for course credit (as a requirement for an introductory psychology class) or cash. Participants were recruited through targeted flyers posted across campus, campus-wide e-mail blasts, and through specific postings to relevant classes. All students who responded to the recruitment materials were eligible to participate. The data of four participants were removed from analyses due to incomplete data (n = 2) or expressing suspicion about the purported purpose of the study (n = 2), resulting in a final sample size of 60. An a priori power analysis conducted using G*Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) found that this sample size allows for the detection of medium-to-large effects, similar to that found in previous research (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011), with a power of .80 and an alpha of .05. Participant demographics are presented in Table 1. All procedures were approved by the university’s institutional review board.

Table 1.

Participant Demographics.

Variable	n (%)
Variable	Study 1	Study 2
Participant gender
Female	30 (50.0)	37 (48.1)
Male	30 (50.0)	40 (51.9)
Participant race/ethnicity
Asian/Pacific Islander	3 (5.0)	11 (14.3)
Black	2 (3.3)	8 (10.4)
Hispanic	3 (5.0)	8 (10.4)
Native American	0 (0.0)	2 (2.6)
White	47 (78.3)	42 (54.5)
Multiracial	4 (6.7)	6 (7.8)
Did not disclose	1 (1.7)	0 (0.0)
Participant age
Range	18–28	18–25
Average	19.31	19.57

Procedure and measures

All procedures took place in the on-campus research laboratory. When participants arrived, the experimenter explained the study and obtained consent. A cover story was created so participants would not know the true purpose of the study, which was to examine affective responses following either a validating or invalidating response from a confederate to the participant’s personal emotional disclosure. Participants were told the study would examine how strangers shared and responded to each other’s emotions so that they would fill out emotion surveys and communicate via written notes about an emotional experience with another participant in the neighboring room.

Participants first completed a survey assessing state affect and then completed the emotional expression task in which they wrote a paragraph about a “recent or ongoing problem” that must have caused significant (but not severe) emotional distress. Participants were told that their peer partner in the neighboring room would complete the same task. After completing the writing task, participants were asked to give their writing to the experimenter. The experimenter then returned with the handwritten emotional paragraph of the alleged peer partner in the neighboring room. In reality, this vignette was standardized by experimenters to bolster the cover story that the participant was communicating with a fellow student. The vignette excluded gendered pronouns and other references to gender to make the gender of the partner ambiguous. The vignette discussed problems within the family, which was selected as an issue relevant to the lives of most undergraduate students, and was kept vague to mitigate perceived similarity with participants who identified with a specific problem.¹

Participants next provided a one or two sentence response to the partner’s vignette and completed a survey assessing their affect and liking of the partner. The experimenter then gave participants their alleged partner’s response. The partner’s response was standardized by experimenters to be either a validating or invalidating response based on Linehan’s (1997) characterization of validation/invalidation. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either the validating (“Well, it sounds like a tough problem. It makes sense that you would be so upset”) or invalidating (“Well, it doesn’t sound like a tough problem. It doesn’t make sense that you would be so upset”) response. Participants completed a final survey assessing affect, liking of the partner, and perceived supportiveness of the partner’s response. The experimenter then debriefed the participant. During exit interviews, participants were probed for suspicion of the cover story.

Affect

The PANAS-X (Watson & Clark, 1994) is a 60-item self-report questionnaire that assesses the extent to which participants are currently experiencing emotional states on a scale from 1 (very slightly or not at all) to 5 (extremely). The following emotional states were assessed: negative affect, hostility, sadness, guilt, surprise, and serenity. The PANAS-X overall demonstrates good construct validity across different samples (Watson & Clark, 1994). Of interest in this examination is global negative affect that consists of 10 items from specific negative affect measures, along with the lower order dimensions of hostility, sadness, and guilt. Surprise was examined as a potentially relevant response to invalidating remarks. Serenity was included to represent a positive affective experience that may be diminished by invalidation. In this sample, all subscales of interest had good internal consistency (α = .80 − .95). Individual scales were summed with mean-replacement, and higher scores indicated higher levels of that affect.

Perceptions of the confederate

The Interpersonal Perceptions Scale (Park & Crocker, 2005) is a self-report measure that assesses perceptions of a confederate’s supportiveness and liking of a confederate. Instructions for the Supportiveness subscale were modified to fit the purposes of the current study such that participants were asked to rate how supportive their confederate’s behavior toward them was on a 7-point scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). For the liking subscale, participants were asked to indicate their responses using the same 7-point scale. Internal consistency of these subscales were good (α = .82 – .90). Scores were computed via sums with mean-replacement, wherein higher scores indicated greater liking and perceived supportiveness.

Results

Analytic strategy

To examine the effect of the invalidating and validating comments on affect and perceptions of the confederate, factorial analyses of covariance were conducted, with condition (validation/invalidation), participants’ gender (male/female), and their interaction as between-subjects factors. Baseline and premanipulation affect were included as covariates across analyses. The effect size partial eta² (ηp²) is reported and represents the proportion of variance explained by the specific effect. Conventions for interpreting ηp² are as follows (Cohen, 1988): .02 (small), .13 (medium), .26 (large). Table 2 reports all main effects of condition from these analyses. Data and accompanying syntax are available upon request from the corresponding author.

Table 2.

Main Effects of Validation Versus Invalidation, Study 1.

	Validation		Invalidation
Variable	M	SE	M	SE	F	df	p	ηp ²
Negative affect	14.32	0.72	16.75	0.72	5.75	1, 54	.020	.10
Hostility	8.16	0.83	12.87	0.83	16.12	1, 54	<.001	.23
Sadness	8.58	0.47	9.09	0.47	0.60	1, 54	.443	.01
Guilt	8.27	0.43	8.43	0.43	0.64	1, 54	.802	<.01
Serenity	8.65	0.36	6.85	0.36	12.72	1, 54	.001	.19
Surprise	5.75	0.54	7.98	0.54	8.38	1, 54	.005	.13
Liking	9.32	0.69	6.64	0.69	7.52	1, 55	.008	.12
Supportiveness	62.83	2.70	38.90	2.70	39.37	1, 56	<.001	.41

Note. Analyses examining affect scales controlled for baseline and premanipulation affect. The analysis examining liking controlled for premanipulation liking. Supportiveness was assessed only postmanipulation.

Affect

The main effect of condition for overall negative affect, as well as hostility, serenity, and surprise, were significant (see Table 2). Specifically, those who were invalidated experienced more negative affect, hostility, and surprise than those who were validated, while those who were invalidated experienced less serenity than those who were validated. Neither the main effect of gender nor the interaction between condition and gender were significantly related to overall negative affect, hostility, serenity, and surprise (ps > .331). Neither of the main effects (condition or gender) or the interaction term were significant for sadness and guilt (ps > .106).

Perceptions of the confederate

For liking, the interaction term between condition and gender was not significant (p = .791). The main effect of condition was significant, indicating that those who were invalidated liked their confederate less than those who were validated (see Table 2), as was the main effect of gender, F(1, 55) = 4.18, p = .046, ηp²= .07, suggesting that men (M = 8.99, SE = 0.69) liked the confederate more across both conditions than women (M = 6.97, SE = 0.69). For supportiveness, the interaction term between condition and gender approached significance, F(1, 56) = 3.05, p = .086, ηp²= .05, revealing that while men and women did not differ in their rating of supportiveness of an invalidating confederate (p = .914), the difference between men and women in their rating of a validating confederate was significant, F(1, 28) = 4.80, p = .037, ηp²= .15, with men (M = 69.72, SE = 4.45) rating the validating confederate as more supportive than women (M = 55.93, SE = 4.45). In addition, the main effect of condition was significant, indicating that those who were invalidated perceived their confederate to be less supportive than those who were validated (see Table 2). The main effect of gender approached significance, F(1, 56) = 3.49, p = .067, ηp²= .06, suggesting that men rated the confederate as slightly more supportive (M = 54.43, SE = 2.70) than women (M = 47.30, SE = 2.70).

Discussion

The purpose of Study 1 was to examine affective responses to a validating or invalidating remark directed at the emotional disclosures of men and women in an experimental setting. The results support both theoretical views (Fruzzetti et al., 2005; Linehan, 1993) and experimental findings (Herr et al., 2015; Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011), demonstrating the negative impact of invalidation. We extended prior work (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011) by examining specific affective responses impacted by invalidation. In addition to greater negative affect broadly, an invalidating confederate—as opposed to a validating confederate—elicited higher levels of hostility and surprise and lower levels of serenity. In addition, the invalidating confederate was liked less and perceived as less supportive than the validating confederate. The affect measures of sadness and guilt were not impacted, contrary to hypotheses. Given that no prior work has examined how invalidation influences sadness and guilt specifically, it is difficult to make a substantive conclusion. While Linehan (1993) suggests that invalidation leads to self-criticism, which would theoretically be related to guilt and sadness, Linehan’s work focused on invalidation particularly from caregivers. It is likely that invalidation provokes different emotions depending on the nature of the relationship. Future research could explore how the response to invalidation may differ depending on the source of the invalidation.

Beyond one interaction that was only marginally significant, the effects of validation versus invalidation were not moderated by gender, suggesting that invalidation resulted in a more negative affective experience relative to validation regardless of gender. Men did, however, express more liking of the confederate than women regardless of condition. There is some support that women may evaluate comforting messages more critically than men (Burleson et al., 2009). Although research in general suggests likely differences in emotion endorsement, past research on invalidation failed to find gender as a moderator for other outcome variables (Lepore et al., 2000; Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011), which perhaps speaks to the universally negative impact of invalidation across groups. Thus, the present findings support the notion that there is a negative emotional impact of invalidation from a brief interpersonal exchange regardless of the gender of the person being invalidated. While it is likely that women face more frequent invalidation than men (Linehan, 1993), these findings suggest that invalidation is similarly impactful to men when exposed to the same form of invalidation. This finding will hopefully encourage more equitable inclusion of men in invalidation research and examination of mental health implications for men who face frequent invalidation.

Study 2

In Study 1, we used a gender-ambiguous confederate to standardize the confederate in a way that was lacking in previous research. It is likely, however, that the gender of the invalidator moderates affective responses to invalidation—an issue that is unexplored in the existing research literature. Limited previous research has either examined only a validating or invalidating female confederate (Lepore et al., 2000, 2004) or neither reported nor controlled for invalidator characteristics (Herr et al., 2015; Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011). Parental invalidation research is similarly limited, often collapsing the results of mothers and fathers (Selby, Braithwaite, Joiner, & Fincham, 2008; Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2014) or focusing on mothers (Shipman et al., 2007; Yap, Allen, & Ladouceur, 2008). While some evidence exists for uniquely negative outcomes related to maternal (Sturrock, Francis, & Carr, 2009) and paternal invalidation (Haslam, Mountford, Meyer, & Waller, 2008; Mountford et al., 2007), these studies are limited by their cross-sectional nature, and the latter two used primarily female samples. Given that only one study to date has examined how the gender of the person who invalidates contributes to dyadic functioning (Leong et al., 2011), it is important to further examine how the gender of the individual who provides the invalidating comment might influence affective reactions to invalidation.

Evidence suggests that women may be less likely to give invalidating responses than men. Fathers have reported a greater likelihood of minimizing sadness in their children compared with mothers (Cassano, Perry-Parrish, & Zeman, 2007), and children likewise have reported perceptions of their fathers as less accepting of negative emotion (Zeman & Garber, 1996). Leong et al. (2011) suggested that wives may refrain from responding to their husbands’ invalidating remarks with further invalidation because women have been largely socialized to not be angry or hostile. Both genders tend to prefer female therapists, for reasons such as feeling more comfortable talking to women and wanting a therapist with stereotypically female characteristics such as warmth (Pikus & Heavey, 1996). Even when women and men provide comparable messages, responses from women are evaluated more positively than responses from men (Samter, Burleson, & Murphy, 1987). If women are perceived to be warmer, more intimate listeners to emotional responses than men, this suggests that men may be perceived as deficient in support or warmth—and possibly the more normative source of invalidation following emotional expressions relative to women. Given these gendered associations, exploring the context of how men and women respond to invalidating responses from either a man or woman would be highly relevant to exploring affective reactions within a social context. However, much of this important prior work on dyads has necessarily focused on existing dyad structures, such as parent–child (Cassano et al., 2007; Zeman & Garber, 1996), couple (Leong et al., 2011), and therapist–client (Pikus & Heavey, 1996), making it difficult to isolate the effect of the invalidating statement as it relates to gender, as opposed to other characteristics of the relationship.

To address this gap, Study 2 examined whether the invalidating confederate’s gender and participant’s gender interact to predict affective reactions to invalidation. Given that Study 1 demonstrated that the invalidating response is more negatively arousing than the validating response, Study 2 focused solely on invalidation. To manipulate the gender of the confederate, the vignette from Study 1 was modified with language, suggesting that the participant was communicating with a man or woman. This quasi-experimental approach improves upon existing research that asks participants to retrospectively report on the effects of invalidation from people of different genders because men and women may naturalistically invalidate differently.

Given that a woman who invalidates an emotional expression is violating expectations to be nice and communal (e.g., Rudman & Glick, 2001), a female invalidator was predicted to provoke more negative perceptions due to this discrepancy of expectations. The norm violation was specifically predicted to elicit surprise and less liking in conditions with a female invalidator, based on research suggesting that women are punished for norm violations (Rudman & Glick, 2001). Due to limited previous research, examination of the other affective measures and of interactions between the invalidator’s gender and recipient’s gender was exploratory.

Method

Participants

Participants were 87 undergraduate students who completed the study in exchange for course credit or cash (recruited via the same methods as in Study 1). Of this sample, the data of 10 participants were removed from analyses due to failing to recall the correct gender of the partner (n = 4), incomplete data (n = 2), disclosing an emotional event that was determined to be too severe to be invalidated (n = 2), personal withdrawal from the study (n = 1), or endorsing suspicion about the purported purpose of the study (n = 1), resulting in a final sample of 77 participants. An a priori power analysis conducted using G*Power (Faul et al., 2007) found that this sample size allows for the detection of medium effects with a power of .80 and an alpha of .05. Participant demographics are presented in Table 1.

Procedure

The procedure was identical to that of Study 1, with two exceptions. First, the writing of the alleged partner was modified such that the vignette primed participants with the partner’s gender. The phrase “you’re an adult” from the Study 1 vignette was modified to read either “you’re a grown man” (male condition) or “you’re a grown woman” (female condition), and participants were randomly assigned to receive one of these vignettes. The salience of this gender prime was pilot tested by randomly presenting male- and female-vignettes to a group of students, who were instructed to read them and later recall the primed gender, and perfect accuracy was confirmed. The other procedural change was that all participants received the invalidating response. After debriefing, participants were probed for suspicion that they were not communicating with a true partner and were asked to recall the confederate gender. Failure to accurately recall the gender of the confederate or suspicion of the cover story merited exclusion from analyses.

Measures

In this sample, internal consistency for the Interpersonal Perceptions Scale (supportiveness: α = .73; pre and post liking: α = .82, .87) and PANAS-X subscales of interest (α = .74 – .93) were adequate.

Results

Analytic strategy

To examine the effect of a male or female confederate on affective responses and perceptions of the confederate, factorial analyses of covariance were conducted, with confederate gender (male/female), participants’ gender (male/female), and their interaction as between-subjects factors. Baseline and premanipulation affect were included as covariates across analyses. Table 3 reports all main effects of confederate gender from these analyses.

Table 3.

Main Effects of Male Versus Female Invalidating Confederate, Study 2.

	Male confederate		Female confederate
Variable	M	SE	M	SE	F	df	p	ηp ²
Negative affect	20.21	0.91	19.04	0.90	0.80	1, 71	.376	.01
Hostility	15.52	0.88	14.18	0.87	1.16	1, 71	.284	.02
Sadness	10.74	0.59	8.92	0.58	4.80	1, 71	.032	.06
Guilt	10.10	0.68	9.10	0.67	1.07	1, 71	.304	.02
Serenity	6.62	0.44	8.11	0.43	5.62	1, 71	.021	.07
Surprise	9.09	0.49	8.53	0.48	0.65	1, 71	.423	.01
Liking	5.22	0.56	6.20	0.55	1.52	1, 72	.222	.02
Supportiveness	36.58	1.92	40.36	1.89	1.97	1, 73	.164	.03

Affect

The main effect of confederate gender was significant for sadness and serenity (see Table 3). Specifically, those who were invalidated by a man expressed more sadness than those who were invalidated by a woman, while those who were invalidated by a man felt less serene than those who were invalidated by a woman. Neither the main effect of participants’ gender nor the interaction term between confederate gender and participants’ gender were significant for sadness or serenity (ps > .198). For guilt, neither the main effect of confederate gender (p = .304) nor participants’ gender was significant (ps > .304). The interaction between confederate gender and participants’ gender, however, was significant, F(1, 71) = 4.19, p = .044, ηp²= .06. A shown in Figure 1, men expressed comparable guilt after being invalidated by a male (M = 9.62, SE = 0.78) or female confederate (M = 9.81, SE = 0.78), F(1, 36) = 0.03, p = .870, ηp²< .01. Women tended to respond with more guilt after being invalidated by a male (M = 10.70, SE = 1.03) than a female confederate (M = 8.20, SE = 1.00), although this relationship failed to reach significance, F(1, 33) = 2.96, p = .095, ηp²= .08.

Figure 1.

Interaction between the gender of the participant and gender of the invalidating partner predicting guilt, Study 2. The difference in guilt endorsed by female participants when invalidated by a male versus female partner only approached significance.

Neither the main effects of confederate or participant gender or the interaction terms were significant for overall negative affect, hostility, or surprise (ps > .158; see Table 3).

Perceptions of the confederate

Neither of the main effects of confederate or participant gender or the interaction terms were significant for liking and supportiveness (ps > .164).

Discussion

The purpose of Study 2 was to examine the moderating effects of the gender of the invalidating confederate and gender of the participant on affective responses to an invalidating remark. This work extends previous research by demonstrating that the gender of the person making the invalidating remark can influence the specific affective reaction to that invalidation. The results revealed that participants responded more negatively when invalidated by a man than by a woman across two specific affect domains: sadness and serenity. Given that this gender distinction was made through a planted gender prime within otherwise identical invalidating statements, this effect cannot be attributed to the different styles in which men and women may naturalistically invalidate. These findings suggest that while invalidation may be expected to provoke a negative emotional response overall, the gender of the invalidator may influence the specific experience of the recipient—regardless of whether the recipient is a man or woman. As in Study 1, participant gender effects suggested that men and women respond comparably to an invalidating remark; however, there was a significant interaction between invalidator gender and participants’ gender, suggesting that women’s guilt was slightly higher when invalidated by a man, although this comparison failed to reach full significance.

The results suggest that the gender of the invalidator differentially influences affect, albeit not in the predicted domains. We predicted that a female invalidator would provoke more surprise and less liking, given expectations regarding female emotionality and warmth; however, these hypotheses were not supported. The findings instead suggest that being invalidated by a man as opposed to a woman may provoke a specific negative affective response, particularly higher sadness and lower serenity. It is noteworthy that being invalidated by a man or woman did not impact hostility, guilt, surprise, liking, or perceptions of supportiveness. Therefore, this effect of a male as opposed to a female invalidator was specific to a few emotional domains.

General Discussion

The results of the present study demonstrate the detrimental and immediate emotional impact of invalidating remarks. We extended prior research that did not examine the influence of the invalidator’s gender (e.g., Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011) by exploring specific affective responses to validation and invalidation from a confederate of ambiguous gender in Study 1 and then invalidation from a male or female confederate in Study 2. The results revealed that a gender-ambiguous invalidating confederate provoked more hostility, surprise, and less serenity than a validating confederate; additionally, the invalidating confederate was less liked and perceived as less supportive than the validating confederate. Being invalidated by a male confederate as opposed to a female provoked a more negative affective response—specifically, increased sadness and decreased serenity. Across both studies, women and men responded relatively similarly across conditions.

Given this evidence of short-term negative consequences of invalidation from a stranger peer partner, it is not surprising that chronic invalidation can lead to associated difficulties regulating emotions (Fruzzetti et al., 2005), often resulting in pervasive psychopathology (Linehan, 1993). Although not in line with our hypothesis and gender norm theory that suggests that female invalidators would provoke more negative emotional reactions (Rudman & Glick, 2001), our results are instead consistent with those of Leong et al. (2011) who found that men’s’ invalidation is capable of generating a more negative emotional response, albeit specifically in mixed-gender dyads. Likewise, results from studies of childhood invalidation have found that worse outcomes are associated with paternal invalidation (e.g., Haslam et al., 2008; Mountford et al., 2007)—although worse outcomes associated with maternal invalidation have also been reported (e.g., Sturrock et al., 2009). Furthermore, real-world effects of increased negative reactions to male invalidation may be reflected in the findings that individuals, regardless of their gender, generally self-disclose more to female than to male conversational partners (Dindia & Allen, 1992) and prefer female therapists (Pikus & Heavey, 1996).

It is not entirely clear, however, why male invalidators would provoke more negative responses than female invalidators. One possibility is that the written form of the invalidation used in the present study influenced the emotional reactions. For instance, Samter et al. (1987) found that messages with comparable qualities were evaluated more positively when coming from a female, rather than male, source. Therefore, it is possible that our participants ascribed a colder or harsher tone to the delivery when the invalidator was male and therefore responded more negatively. It is also important to note that, while hostility and aggression are common responses to invalidation (Herr et al., 2015), participants in our study reacted with more internalizing emotions, such as sadness or guilt. This finding may be consistent with theories of male societal power and evidence that women are interrupted more than men (Hancock & Rubin, 2014) and female attempts at continuing conversation are less successful than male attempts (Fishman, 1978). Given that invalidation is an assertive action, it may be that it amplifies the power dynamic when the invalidator is male and may make the invalidated individual reflect with internalizing (and socially safer) emotions. Given that this invalidator gender effect was consistent across male and female participants, it is noteworthy that a male invalidator can exert this same internalizing reaction among male participants. While not evocative of the same power dynamic, men are similarly socialized to value male opinions, and therefore both female and male participants are vulnerable to internalizing responses to harsh male criticism.

Across both studies, participant gender effects were sparse. In Study 1, men generally liked the confederate more than women; additionally, men perceived the validating confederate as more supportive than women, although this finding only approached significance. In Study 2, the only finding that approached significance regarding participants’ gender was an interaction with confederate gender predicting guilt: Specifically, women expressed more guilt in response to a male confederate than a female confederate, although the simple effect in women only approached significance. It is possible that women’s increased comfort communicating with a fellow woman may buffer the negative impact of invalidation; however, given the limited empirical work on affect and invalidation, and the failure for the difference among women to reach significance, this result should be interpreted with caution. Future research could further explore differential affective responses to invalidation based on dyad composition.

Limitations and Future Directions

One limitation of this study and the literature is the lack of a concrete standard of what is validating or invalidating. While previous studies have similarly employed a validation and invalidation manipulation, it is worth noting that whether a comment is validating or invalidating depends upon individual perception. The standardized validating response needed to be brief and broad enough to apply to any situation, but it may be that true validation requires idiosyncratic responses. In the interest of not arousing suspicion that the interaction was contrived, this study did not include a face valid assessment asking participants if they felt validated/invalidated. Nonetheless, we believe that the large effect of the validation being perceived as more supportive than the invalidation is evidence that participants felt less validated by the invalidator and more validated by the validator. Future research could include additional assessments of perceptions of these comments to refine this methodology.

It is possible that the effect of confederate gender was mitigated by the prime’s relatively low salience. However, because only four participants failed to recall the gender of their partner during debriefing, we are confident that the signal phrase was sufficient. Another limitation of this study was the use of a relatively small college sample in the eastern United States. While a larger sample size would be desirable, comparable sample sizes have been used in previous invalidation research examining student populations (Herr et al., 2015; Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011). Finally, because all participants were students, the present findings may not generalize to other groups. Furthermore, because this college sample came from one university in the United States, this study was not able to explore the influence of culture on responses to validation and invalidation. Indeed, prior studies examining validation and invalidation have been conducted in the United States and similarly lack this cultural context. Given that emotional experience can vary across cultures (De Leersnyder, Boiger, & Mesquita, 2013), future research would greatly benefit from adopting a cultural lens and exploring cross-cultural responses to validating and invalidating responses to emotional expressions.

While examining a college sample from one university in the United States does limit the wide applicability of these findings, we believe that these findings have important theoretical and practical implications. Given that much of the work on invalidation has focused on the effect of invalidation on individuals who are already vulnerable to emotional difficulties (e.g., Linehan, 1993), this research demonstrated that in a nonclinical sample, even a brief, written invalidating statement from a stranger could elicit a negative affective response. This suggests that invalidation is a worthy topic of examination not only in vulnerable clinical populations, but as an important area of investigation in all dyadic interactions. While the development of disorders such as BPD is conceptualized as chronic invalidation interacting with a more innate vulnerability of emotion dysregulation (Linehan, 1993), research has not examined what the cumulative effects of chronic invalidation would be even in the absence of an understood emotional vulnerability. Given the brief impact of invalidation observed in the present study, we imagine that chronically experiencing invalidation would likely predict worsened mental health over time as well as degradation of interpersonal relationships. The negative impact of invalidation relative to validation, especially when the invalidator was male, has important applications within educational and clinical settings. Educational seminars more broadly focused on fostering healthy interpersonal relationships could include information regarding the importance of validation as an alternative strategy to invalidation, given invalidation’s impact both on the recipient’s emotions and on the liking of the invalidating individual. Couple therapists may consider being especially attentive to the degree to which a male partner’s invalidation affects the emotions of the female partner. While future research is certainly needed to evaluate the usefulness of this model extended into these additional settings, we believe the broad impact of invalidation in this study implies that this future work would be beneficial to fostering emotional health at a broader societal level.

Conclusion

Overall, our studies explored how gender moderates affective reactions and interpersonal perceptions following validating or invalidating remarks. Given the importance in examining potential gender differences within different contexts (e.g., Yoder & Kahn, 2003), this study examined whether affective gender differences emerge when validated or invalidated by a gender-ambiguous partner or when invalidated by a male or female partner. Our findings suggest that invalidation produces a more negative emotional experience relative to validation equally among men and women. Given that invalidation has been primarily studied in women and linked to pathology such as BPD (Linehan, 1993) and eating disorders (Mountford et al., 2007), research is needed to explore how invalidation may contribute to maladaptive health outcomes among men. This is the first study to manipulate how the gender of the invalidator influences responses, and more research is needed to probe how expectations surrounding gender may shape emotional responding. Given how sexism is a source of invalidation in our culture (Linehan, 1993; Salter, 2012), addressing the entrenched expectations regarding male and female emotionality is critical in reducing tendencies to invalidate more broadly. While the present research did not explicitly address strategies for reducing invalidation interpersonally, this work demonstrates that select word changes within a brief anonymous exchange was sufficient to produce changes in affect and interpersonal perceptions—results that will hopefully encourage further research on invalidation and spur additional work on interpersonal interventions that reduce tendencies to invalidate in close relationships.

Footnotes

Author Note

This article is based in part on the Master’s thesis of Danielle M. Weber completed at American University. She is now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Lauren Van Alstine for assistance in data collection.

Article Notes

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