Relationships Between Power,Communication About Work and Sex,and Emotion Expression: A Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Analysis

Abstract

Few experiences direct affect, behavior, and cognition as thoroughly as feelings of power and powerlessness. The present study examined 403 participants’ narrated experiences feeling powerful (n = 196) or powerless (n = 207) using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analysis to identify social contexts that might explain the effects of power on emotion expression. Powerful narratives contained more frequent communication about work, whereas powerless narratives contained more frequent communication about sex. Moreover, powerless narratives conveyed greater negative emotionality. A parallel mediation analysis revealed that communication about work and sex helped to explain the association between self-reported feelings of power and expressions of negative emotionality. When participants felt powerful and communicated about work, they expressed lower negative emotionality; when participants felt powerless and communicated about sex, they expressed higher negative emotionality. Modest differences in emotional expression between women and men indicated that power research should report analyses including gender as a control variable. Findings provide direction to the next wave of power research, which should examine organizations and intimate relationships as contexts in which power dynamics are salient.

Keywords

power work sex emotion gender linguistic inquiry and word count

Few experiences direct affect, behavior, and cognition as thoroughly as feelings of power and powerlessness. Power is associated with confidence, control, and tolerance for risk (Anderson & Galinsky, 2006; Galinsky et al., 2003; Keltner et al., 2003), whereas powerlessness is associated with inhibition, distress, and social disengagement (Foulk et al., 2020; Schaerer et al., 2021; Schmid et al., 2015). The consistent effects of power on affect, behavior, and cognition make the experience of power akin to a drive state such as hunger, sleepiness, or sexual arousal that motivates biologically necessary behaviors (e.g., to eat, sleep, mate; Buck, 1999; Van Boven & Loewenstein, 2003). Indeed, savvy navigation of power and status hierarchies were historically vital to survival and remain necessary for interpersonal success (Blader & Chen, 2014; Magee & Galinsky, 2008).

A common experimental method for studying the roots and reach of power involves prompting research participants to write a brief narrative about a time they felt powerful or powerless as a supraliminal priming manipulation (Galinsky et al., 2003). Few investigations have examined the contents of participants’ narratives (cf. Livingston & Vik, 2021; Vik & Livingston, 2022): The overwhelming majority of such studies examine effects of the written prime on subsequent self-reported or observational dependent variables relevant to the power construct (Galinsky et al., 2015, for review). The purpose of the current study was to enhance practical and theoretical understandings of power’s bases and affordances by characterizing participants’ narrated experiences with power and powerlessness. In exploring the contents of participants’ narratives, the current study identified social contexts that are particularly salient to feelings of power; namely, experiences in the workplace and experiences in sexual relationships. The results of this research can help to identify and control for third variables that sometimes interact with manipulations of power (e.g., participant gender, especially in sexual contexts) and chart a path forward for investigations of power that account for participants’ experiences.

Predictors of Power and Powerlessness

Feelings of social power are both socially derived and subjectively perceived. People derive feelings of power from perceived opportunities to control or evaluate interaction partners (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Social power is distinct from constructs such as locus of control (Lefcourt, 2013, for review) in that the extent to which a person has power depends on their real or perceived ability to influence other people (e.g., via control or evaluation; Anderson et al., 2012; French & Raven, 1959). The social dynamics present in organizational hierarchies and in intimate relationships make these contexts particularly relevant to the examination of power. In the current exploration of participants’ narrated experiences feeling powerful or powerless, we expected these themes to be prevalent and to have implications for understanding the predictors of power and powerlessness.

Power in the Context of Work

Opportunities to control or evaluate often occur in the contexts of organizations and negotiations, making these some of the most studied situations that engender feelings of power or powerlessness (Anderson & Brion, 2014; Flynn et al., 2011). For example, supervisors might derive feelings of power from their position in a workplace hierarchy due to their institutional authority over subordinates (e.g., Weick & Guinote, 2008, Study 2); negotiators might feel powerful knowing that they control a resource desired by their negotiation partners (Magee et al., 2007). In one qualitative analysis of experiences that made university students feel powerful, themes of overseeing colleagues in collaborative work groups, serving as captain of a sports team, and guiding children’s development in daycare settings suggested that experiences emerging as a leader can facilitate feelings of power (Vik & Livingston, 2022). Although that study reported novel observations of the antecedent situations that facilitated feelings of power, its qualitative methodology precluded claims regarding the strength of association between power and the workplace. Further, results from a non-student population can indicate whether that association generalizes to an older and more representative community sample. The current study aimed to fill this gap in the research literature. It is pertinent to quantitatively examine the contents of more age-diverse participants’ narrated experiences to understand power’s potential predictors.

Powerlessness in the Context of Sexual Relationships

Romantic and sexual relationships provide another context in which power dynamics are often made salient. Bargh and colleagues argued that power and sex are linked implicitly, such that reminders of one activate the other (Bargh et al., 1995; Bargh & Raymond, 1995). Indeed, power is associated with increased perceptions of subordinates’ attractiveness (Bargh et al., 1995), women’s sexual willingness (Livingston & Davis, 2020), and one’s own sexual desirability (Lammers & Stoker, 2019). In one analysis of 314 research participants’ self-reported experiences feeling powerful or powerless, more than one-third of the sample (39%) volunteered descriptions of intimate relationships in which participants derived feelings of power from strategically having or withholding sex or powerlessness from sexual victimization (as well as other themes; Livingston & Vik, 2021). This body of prior work suggests that like workplace experiences, sexual relationships can influence feelings of power. Because the most common supraliminal priming method to manipulate feelings of power requires participants to write about a personal experience (Galinsky et al., 2003), and many of those experiences seem to be related to work or sex, it is reasonable to examine what effects, if any, reminders of those contexts can have on subsequent affect and behavior.

The robust link between power and sex might explain why manipulations of power sometimes affect women and men differently: Compared to college women, college men reported feeling more powerful after writing about experiences controlling or being controlled by others (Livingston & Davis, 2020). Although research employing similar manipulations of power does not report analyses including gender as a predictor of feelings of power (Galinsky et al., 2015, for review), such analyses might reveal gender differences on manipulation checks to be widespread in power research and potentially responsible for equivocal findings. Such findings are unsurprising given that gender and power are often confounded with men occupying greater positions of power historically and in modern society (Armstrong et al., 2018; Miller, 2018), and given that men are often aggressors in instances of sexual misconduct (Edwards et al., 2015). Feelings of power might provide some explanation for gender differences observed in the workplace (Eagly & Wood, 1999) and in sexual relationships (Lammers & Stoker, 2019). The current research addressed this gap in the current research literature by testing gender differences that might explain unexpected effects of gender observed in prior investigations.

Consequences of Power and Powerlessness

Feelings of power are associated with increased positive emotionality (Berdahl & Martorana, 2006; Bombari et al., 2017; Schmid Mast et al., 2009) and a general approach tendency according to the approach-inhibition theory of power (Keltner et al., 2003). Powerful people deploy attention strategically to enhance goal attainment and they expect that their behaviors will have their intended effects (Guinote, 2007, 2017). Power increases agency (Rucker & Galinsky, 2016), trust of others (Carney et al., 2013), and confidence that interaction partners will perceive the powerholder favorably (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002). Together, this network of traits facilitates a prosocial orientation among the powerful that generates increased momentum for their ascension of power hierarchies and buffers against negative emotions that might accompany failure (Côté et al., 2011; Winterich et al., 2010). Feelings of power facilitate goal-directed action and a willingness to take risks that often pay off in interpersonal situations (Galinsky et al., 2008; Guinote, 2017; Guinote & Chen, 2017), making power a particularly valuable commodity in the workplace.

Although resilience and perseverance afforded by power can enhance performance in a variety of social situations, the deleterious effects of power should not be overlooked, especially in the context of sexual relationships. Power might contribute to misunderstandings regarding sexual intentions and, perhaps consequently, the perpetration of sexual violence. Powerful women and men perceived women’s ambiguous behaviors to be more indicative of sexual willingness, which could lead to the perpetration of sexual violence (Livingston & Davis, 2020). These authors found that power assimilated women’s and men’s perceptions of sexual intent, although men overall reported greater feelings of power compared to women. Recalling instances in which they had power, university students reported experiencing regret after exploiting or humiliating sexual partners (Livingston & Vik, 2021). Indeed, power can disinhibit anti-social and unethical behavior in a variety of social contexts including intimate relationships and organizations (Dubois et al., 2015; Gruenfeld et al., 2008). Behavior among the powerful is more dynamic than that of the powerless: more dependent on wants, situational factors, and bodily information such as emotions and cravings (Guinote, 2017; Guinote & Chen, 2017). Thus, the many benefits of power for the powerholder can entail costs for interaction partners.

Among the powerless, negative emotionality and behavioral inhibition can contribute to self-fulfilling prophecies. Displeased with their environments but lacking self-perceived agency to make wanted changes, the powerless tolerate greater levels of discomfort without seeking remedies (Galinsky et al., 2003). For example, Galinsky and colleagues (2003, Study 2) placed powerful and powerless participants in front of a desk fan deliberately positioned to create a nuisance by blowing air directly onto their faces. Although presumably an aversive experience for all participants, the powerful were twice as likely to move the fan compared to the powerless. This study provided an analogue to how the powerless accept distress and agitation associated with their low position in a social hierarchy. Consigned to their place, the powerless accept displeasure rather than acting to ameliorate it. As the powerful leverage their momentum to further ascend social hierarchies, the powerless stagnate. The current analysis of narrated experiences aimed to help explain such counterintuitive behaviors among the powerless.

Study Overview

The purpose of the current study was to enhance practical and theoretical understandings of power’s bases and affordances by characterizing participants’ narrated experiences with power and powerlessness. Participants wrote about a time they felt powerful (n = 196) or powerless (n = 207) according to random assignment to experimental conditions. After writing their narratives, participants self-reported the extent to which they felt powerful or powerless in the situation they described. We used LIWC software to analyze the contents of participants’ narratives and to construct a path model illustrating relationships between feelings of power and narrative contents.

We hypothesized that narratives describing powerless (vs. powerful) experiences would possess higher proportions of negatively valenced emotion words, consistent with theoretical understandings of powerlessness as a state associated with distress and avoidance (Keltner et al., 2003; Schaerer et al., 2021). We also hypothesized that powerful (vs. powerless) narratives would contain higher proportions of work-related words because participants might derive feelings of power (vs. powerlessness) from organizational experiences (Anderson & Brion, 2014; Flynn et al., 2011). On the other hand, we expected powerless (vs. powerful) narratives to contain higher proportions of sex-related words as participants might express powerlessness in the context of sexual victimization or coercion (Livingston & Vik, 2021). To address a gap in the extant literature regarding the prevalence and effects of gender differences on feelings of power, we also explored the influence of participant gender on the contents of narrated experiences.

Method

The current study utilized a two-way between-groups design with power condition (powerful vs. powerless) and participant gender (women vs. men) as input variables and proportions of words from the LIWC dictionary present in narratives as the output variable. The study received approval from the Internal Review Board (IRB) at a university in the southwestern U.S.

Participants

Study participants (N = 403) were 274 women (68%) and 129 men (32%) recruited from a nationwide sample via Qualtrics panels, an online participant recruitment tool that sends research invitations to qualifying participants who previously agreed to be contacted for market research surveys (Qualtrics, 2022). To qualify for the current study, which was followed by a subsequent data collection related to decision-making, participants had to be U.S. citizens at least 18 years of age. Participants’ mean age was 48.33 years (SD = 18.79). The majority of the sample identified as White (n = 336; 83.38%) followed by Asian (n = 31; 7.69%), Black or African American (n = 13; 3.23%), Hispanic or Latino/a (n = 12; 2.98%), and other racial/ethnic groups (n = 11; 2.73%). Participants received $3.25 in exchange for completing the study. There were enough women and men included in the sample to perform all planned analyses measuring effects of gender. A post hoc power analysis demonstrated that the observed effect size of Cohen’s f = 0.46 and obtained sample size of N = 403 produced adequate statistical power of 1.00 for our primary two-way ANOVA.

Materials and Procedure

Participants wrote narratives in approximately 200 words describing an experience in which they had power over someone else (n = 196; 48.64%) or in which someone else had power over them (n = 207; 51.37%) according to random assignment to a powerful or powerless condition. The narrative instructions were adapted from Galinsky and colleagues (2003), as follows (text for the powerless condition appears italicized in parentheses):

A Time You Felt Powerful (Powerless): In this section we would like you to write about a particular incident in which you had power over another person or people (someone else had power over you). By power, we mean a situation in which you controlled the ability of another person or people to get something they wanted (someone had control over your ability to get something you wanted), or in which you were in a position to evaluate those people (someone was in a position to evaluate you). Please describe this situation in which you had power (did not have power) including what happened, how you felt, etc. Take a moment to relive the experience in your mind.

Participants wrote two separate narratives, each consisting of approximately 100 words: one narrative describing “what happened,” and another describing “how you felt.” These prompts elicited information about both the basis of participants’ experiences (e.g., in the workplace, in an intimate relationship) and their emotional reactions.

After writing these narratives, participants responded to six items assessing their self-reported feelings of power adapted from Fischer and colleagues (2011). The items read, “In the situation you described, to what extent did you feel superior/in control/respected/that you were an authority/helpless (reverse coded)/powerful.” The combined six-item scale was reliable for use in inferential analyses as a measure of feelings of power (α = .92). Next, participants responded to a series of quantitative questionnaires and provided demographic information including age, gender, and race/ethnicity.

Analysis

We analyzed participants’ narratives using the LIWC software program (Pennebaker et al., 2015). To prepare narratives for analysis, we combined all narratives into one spreadsheet organized by power condition and participant gender. LIWC software compared the contents of each narrative to its validated internal dictionary to calculate percentages of words representative of each of its approximately 100 categories. For example, words including hurt, ugly, and nasty are quantified as expressions of negative emotionality. Each narrative received a value on approximately 100 linguistic dimensions. The resulting data were imported to RStudio (RStudio Team, 2020) for statistical analysis.

We also constructed a parallel mediation model to illustrate relationships between variables of theoretical interest. The purpose of constructing this model was not to make causal claims about relationships between outcome variables, but instead to depict and conceptualize correlations between narrative contents as a function of feelings of power. Consistent with theoretical predictions that (1) feelings of power are related to experiences controlling or evaluating others in organizations and (2) feelings of powerlessness are related to experiences being controlled or evaluated in intimate relationships, we examined whether these variables could explain the inverse relationship between power and use of negative emotion words in participants’ narratives. We used PROCESS for R Version 4.1 (Hayes, 2022) to construct a parallel mediation model with participants’ self-reported feelings of power (measured on a 7-point scale adapted from Fischer et al., 2011) as the input variable, negative emotion words as the outcome variable, and work-related words and sex-related words as mediators.

Results

We first examined hypothesized effects of power condition and participant gender on narrative contents. Because no extant study has provided a comprehensive analysis of narrated experiences with power and powerlessness, we report exploratory analyses to advance power research and clarify artifacts in previously reported data (e.g., gender effects on power manipulation checks; Livingston & Davis, 2020). Table 1 contains means and standard deviations of relevant LIWC categories separated by participant gender and power condition as well as example words for each category.

Table 1.

Means and standard deviations for LIWC categories separated by power condition and participant gender.

	Example Words¹	Power Condition		Participant Gender
LIWC Category	Example Words¹	Powerful	Powerless	Women	Men
Negative emotionality	hurt, ugly, nasty	2.26	3.98***	3.21	3.00
Work	jobs, majors, xerox	4.58***	3.43	4.02	3.93
Sex	horny, love, incest	0.06	0.12+	0.10	0.07
Clout²		40.96***	30.95	36.06	35.32
Tone²		44.46***	20.71	31.28	34.35
Authenticity²		59.23	70.63***	63.88	67.63
Anxiety	worried, fearful	0.50	0.64***	0.76+	0.59
Anger	hate, kill, annoyed	0.63	1.23***	1.00+	0.80
Sadness	crying, grief, sad	0.44	0.85***	0.64	0.68
Social	mate, talk, they	10.00*	8.93	9.72+	8.88
Family	daughter, dad, aunt	0.42	0.77*	0.70*	0.41
Friends	buddy, neighbor	0.23	0.29	0.22	0.33+

Note. *** = p < .001, ** = p < .01, * = p < .05, + = marginal for comparisons within factors (i.e., powerful vs. powerless; women vs. men).

¹The LIWC 2015 codebook contains example words for additional categories (Pennebaker et al., 2015).

²Pennebaker and colleagues (2015) classify clout (Kacewicz et al., 2013), tone (Cohn et al., 2004), and authenticity (Newman et al., 2003) as “summary language variables” derived from prior research. LIWC 2015 software does not provide example words for these categories.

Effects of Power Condition and Participant Gender

Powerless narratives contained significantly more negative emotion words (M = 3.98, SD = 2.16) compared to powerful narratives (M = 2.26, SD = 1.70; t(401) = 8.84, p < .001, d = 0.88). Results also indicated that powerful narratives contained significantly more work-related words (M = 4.58, SD = 3.76) compared to powerless narratives (M = 3.43, SD = 3.12; t(401) = −3.34, p < .001, d = 0.33). Lastly, powerless narratives contained marginally more sex-related words (M = 0.12, SD = 0.42) compared to powerful narratives (M = 0.06, SD = 0.29; t(401) = 1.71, p = .09, d = 0.17). This marginal relationship should be interpreted with caution; however, given prior research and critical scholarship indicating that sexual victimization is associated with powerlessness (Armstrong et al., 2018; Livingston & Vik, 2021; Miller, 2018), it is unlikely that this finding represents a Type I error. Table 1 summarizes the results of these and other exploratory analyses.

Next, we constructed two-way ANOVAs that added participant gender as a second factor in addition to power condition to examine main effects and interactions on expressions of negative emotion, work-related words, and sex-related words. The first model, depicted in Figure 1, revealed two main effects of participant gender (F(1,399) = 4.92, p = .03, η_p² = 0.002) and power condition (F(1,399) = 10.43, p = .001, η_p² = 0.17) on expressions of negative emotion, qualified by a two-way interaction (F(1,399) = 4.73, p = .03, η_p² = 0.01). In the powerless condition, women (M = 4.18, SD = 2.26) expressed greater negative emotion than did men (M = 3.54, SD = 1.89; t(205) = −2.01, p = .04, d = 0.30). However, in the powerful condition, women (M = 2.18, SD = 1.55) and men (M = 2.44, SD = 1.96) expressed equally low negative emotion (p > .05). The ANOVAs examining effects of power and participant gender on work-related words and sex-related words revealed nonsignificant main effects and interactions (all ps > .10).

Figure 1.

Main effects of participant gender and power condition on expressions of negative emotionality were qualified by a two-way interaction. In the powerless condition, women expressed greater negative emotion compared to men. However, in the powerful condition, women and men expressed equally low negative emotion.

Parallel Mediation Analysis

Parallel mediation analysis indicated that feelings of power were indirectly related to expressions of negative emotionality through its relationship with communication about work and sex. The model is depicted in Figure 2. First, feelings of power were positively related to communication about work (a₁ = 0.49, p < .001), and an increased proportion of communication about work was inversely related to expressions of negative emotionality (b₁ = −0.09, p < .001). A 95% bias-corrected confidence interval based on 10,000 bootstrap samples indicated that the indirect effect through communication about work (a₁b₁ = −0.05), holding the other mediator constant, was entirely below zero (−0.08, - 0.02). Second, feelings of power were negatively related to communication about sex (a₂ = −0.02, p = .03), and an increased proportion of communication about sex was positively related to expressions of negative emotionality (b₂ = 0.69, p = .009). A 95% bias-corrected confidence interval based on 10,000 bootstrap samples indicated that the indirect effect through communication about sex (a₂b₂ = −0.01), holding the other mediator constant, was entirely below zero (−0.04, −0.0008). Moreover, feelings of power were inversely related to expressions of negative emotionality even when accounting for the indirect effects through communication about work and sex (c’ = −0.44, 95% CI [-0.55, −0.34]). The total effect was significant (c = −0.50, 95% CI [−0.09, −0.02]); thus, communication about work and sex were both significant pathways associated with the relationship between feelings of power and expressions of negative emotionality.

Figure 2.

Parallel mediation analysis examining the effect of feelings of power on expressions of negative emotionality through communication about work and sex. Note. *** = p < .001, ** = p < .01, * = p < .05.

Discussion

Perceived opportunities to control or evaluate others enhance feelings of social power (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). The most common method for manipulating feelings of power or powerlessness prompts participants to write about a relevant personal experience (Galinsky et al., 2003). Participants’ written narratives serve as supraliminal primes that affect subsequent affective, behavioral, and cognitive measures (Galinsky et al., 2015, for review). However, no extant studies have quantitatively examined the contents of participants’ narratives, which could affect subsequent responding to dependent measures relevant to feelings of power. The few qualitative examinations of these narrative contents (Livingston & Vik, 2021; Vik & Livingston, 2022) suggested that, among university students, interactions in the workplace and in sexual relationships provide the context for many powerful and powerless experiences. The current study filled this gap in the extant research literature by recruiting a non-student sample, implementing Galinsky and colleagues’ (2003) common priming task, and quantitatively analyzing the narrative contents using LIWC software (Pennebaker et al., 2015).

In line with predictions, findings indicated frequent reference to the workplace and to sexual relationships. The current quantitative analytical approach revealed that power in the context of the workplace can decrease negative emotion expression, whereas powerlessness in the context of sexual relationships can increase expressions of negative emotion. Words related to work were prevalent in powerful participants’ narratives. The workplace provides employees with formal and informal leadership roles, which could explain why they communicated about work when narrating their experiences feeling powerful. Powerless participants used marginally more sex-related words, indicating that vulnerability or victimization in intimate relationships might provide salient examples of feeling controlled or evaluated by others. Thus, compared to sexual relationships, the workplace might be a more productive environment to develop and channel feelings of power without eliciting negative emotion.

Only one study to our knowledge has reported on gender differences in feelings of power (Livingston & Davis, 2020). Power and gender are often confounded in broader social hierarchies such that men occupy an outsized proportion of high-power social roles (Eagly & Wood, 1999; Woody & Eagly, 2012). We explored differences in women’s and men’s communication to examine whether gender or power is the primary predictor of observed gender differences. Minimal gender differences emerged in the contents of participants’ narratives: Instead, manipulated power produced the larger differences in communication. This result supported the notion that observed gender differences in social thinking and behavior may be minimized as women continue to gain in social power in the workplace and in sexual relationships (Eagly & Wood, 1999). Power was inversely related to expressions of negative emotionality, and powerless women expressed significantly more negative emotionality in their narratives than did powerless men (but this gender difference disappeared among powerful narratives). Future research manipulating power should report on interactions with participant gender. Overall, these findings have implications for understanding relationships between power, emotion, social context (i.e., the workplace and sexual relationships), and gender.

Powerlessness and Expressions of Negative Emotionality

In describing their personal experiences, powerless participants used significantly more negative emotion words compared to their powerful counterparts. These findings support the characterization of powerlessness as an aversive state associated with emotions such as anxiety and sadness. Such emotions predict inhibition and avoidance (Keltner et al., 2003), leading the powerless to stagnate near the bottom of a power hierarchy rather than to take goal-directed action that satisfies their wants and needs. In contrast to some evidence that absolute powerlessness (relative to having little, but some, power) enhances approach tendencies associated with positive emotionality (Reit et al., 2020; Schaerer et al., 2015), the current data supported a linear relationship between feelings of power and expressions of negative emotion. That is, participants who self-reported feeling the lowest levels of power also expressed the greatest proportion of negative emotion words in their written narratives; and this proportion decreased in a linear fashion as self-reported power increased. If the experience of absolute powerlessness has similar effects to feelings of power, affectivity does not appear to be the causal mechanism. Future research should attempt to replicate prior findings related to absolute powerlessness and propose an alternative account of this curious relationship.

When describing feeling powerful, women’s and men’s narratives contained equally low rates of negative emotion words. However, when they felt powerless, women used significantly more negative emotion words compared to men. Gender differences in the emotional experience of powerlessness might contribute to unexpected gender effects of gender on power manipulation checks observed in previous research (Davis & Livingston, 2020). Patriarchal hierarchies in organizations and intimate relationships might lead powerless women in particular to experience stereotyping, discrimination, or other maltreatment. Women’s powerless experiences are thus especially laden with negative emotionality compared to men’s. Participant gender might systematically influence the contents, and perhaps the subsequent effects, of the most common manipulation of feelings of power (i.e., Galinsky et al., 2003; Galinsky et al., 2015 for review). Although gender differences were smaller than power differences on narrative contents (see Table 1 for summary statistics), women’s narratives varied marginally or significantly in how often they described social relations, friends, family, and emotions such as anger and anxiety. The contents of participants’ narratives, and thus the constructs incidentally primed by these narratives, might contribute to differential effects of the priming manipulation according to participant gender. This potential effect does not invalidate the narrative writing task as a supraliminal priming method: Instead, this effect suggests that researchers using this method should report analyses testing for gender differences on manipulation checks and dependent variables and controlling for participant gender where necessary.

The Social Contexts of Power and Powerlessness

In recent decades, examinations of the power construct have thoroughly documented its effects on affect, behavior, and cognition (Cho & Keltner, 2020; Galinsky et al., 2015; Guinote, 2017, for review). Formerly considered an anti-social state of mind that facilitated negative stereotyping and coercive control of the less powerful (Fiske, 1993; Fiske & Dépret, 1996), more contemporary data have revealed the prosocial effects of power to increase trust (Carney et al., 2013) and empathetic accuracy (Côté et al., 2011). The next wave of power research should document the interpersonal contexts that engender feelings of power and powerlessness with the goal of optimizing relevant social situations. The current study provided a first step toward identifying organizations and intimate relationships as important contexts for future investigations. Ideally, organizations and intimate relationships alike should enhance feelings of control and the potential to evaluate, and limit aversive states of powerlessness that present data associated with negative emotional expressions.

We hypothesized that participants derive feelings of power from controlling or evaluating others in the workplace or in other organizations, and feelings of powerlessness from aversive sexual experiences. An exploratory parallel mediation model examined these relationships as well as the potential for communication about work and sex to explain the observed inverse relationship between feelings of power and expressed negative emotionality. Each path in the model was significant in the expected direction, supporting the contention that organizations and intimate relationships are fundamental social contexts in which to examine the roots and reach of power and powerlessness. When participants felt powerful and communicated about work, they expressed lower negative emotionality. However, when participants felt powerless and communicated about sex, they expressed higher negative emotionality. Power and organizational/workplace behavior together might inspire a productive sense of duty, responsibility, and accomplishment (Vik & Livingston, 2022), indicating that empowerment in the workplace can benefit organizational members’ emotional state. On the other hand, power and sex together might make salient memories of sexual trauma or regret (Livingston & Vik, 2021), indicating that powerlessness in intimate relationships can contribute to lasting negative emotionality.

This model included self-reported feelings of power, rather than power condition, as a continuous predictor of communication about work, sex, and negative emotionality to examine correlational associations. The positive association between feelings of power and communication about work, and the inverse relationship between communication about work and negative emotionality, suggests that organizations that empower their members can cultivate a happier and potentially more productive workforce. Opportunities for empowerment might include leadership roles for members, equal-status interaction across the organizational hierarchy, and open communication between managers and subordinates. Formal and informal opportunities to lead others and control valuable resources can help organizational members feel valued and integral to the organization’s functioning. Such feelings can buffer against negative emotions that are bound to arise in the workplace, providing the powerful with more emotional resources and greater resilience to accomplish difficult tasks. Such perseverance likely leads to continued advancement and an accumulation of greater organizational power over time.

Compared to communication about work, communication about sex demonstrated the opposite pattern related to feelings of power and negative emotionality. Communication about sex increased as feelings of power decreased, and communication about sex was positively related to expressions of negative emotionality. Extant research helps to explain these findings, but future studies should examine the effects of powerlessness on sexual thinking and behavior. Partners in unhealthy intimate relationships sometimes engage in or withhold sex as a means of manipulation (Livingston & Vik, 2021). Coercive sexual encounters can contribute to chronic feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness (Armstrong et al., 2018; Miller, 2018). The sexual context appears to be a notable exception to recent data demonstrating the prosocial effects of power on social relations (Carney et al., 2013; Côté et al., 2011). An emergent pattern of findings suggests that people who feel powerful tend to abuse their influence in sexual interactions and overperceive their sexual desirability or other people’s willingness to engage in sex (Bargh et al., 1995; Lammers & Stoker, 2019). The present analysis indicated that participants randomly assigned to write about a powerless (vs. powerful) experience communicated marginally more about sex, and that subsequent self-reported feelings of power were inversely related to communication about sex. Future research should study this relationship deliberately by testing whether people who feel powerless are more sexually inhibited, more vigilant of potential sexual victimization, or less interested in sex altogether. Examining effects of powerlessness on sexual thinking and behavior can further disentangle the close relationship between these constructs observed here and in prior research.

Gender Differences in Power Research

Few published studies report analyses including gender as a predictor of feelings of power or associated outcomes. However, a recent investigation using a student sample (Livingston & Davis, 2020) demonstrated that women reported feeling less powerful in general compared to men. This finding is unsurprising given that the social roles women occupy are typically perceived to be less powerful compared to the roles occupied by men (Eagly & Wood, 1999; Wood & Eagly, 2012). The present investigation revealed that the unique experiences upon which women and men draw when thinking about power might account for observed gender differences. We observed limited gender differences in the contents of participants’ narratives. Women’s narratives conveyed marginally greater anxiety, anger, and social sentiments, and significantly greater communication about family (men’s narratives conveyed marginally greater communication about friends). These limited differences, especially those related to emotional expression further demonstrated by a gender-by-power interaction on negative emotions, might be enough to confound written power manipulations if women and men systematically write about different experiences. Future research should report analyses including gender in the interest of transparency.

Despite these limited gender differences, women’s and men’s narratives did not vary in proportions of communication about work or sex. In organizations, women and men alike navigate status hierarchies and hold positions of formal and informal power affording opportunities to control and evaluate others (or to be controlled and evaluated). The same is true in healthy intimate relationships characterized by equal status (Fuglestad & Levert, 2021). The present lack of gender differences in the prevalence of communication about work and sex supports hypotheses based on the social role perspective (Eagly & Wood, 1999). This perspective suggests that some observations traditionally attributed to sex differences, such as divergent mate preferences between women and men, might be better explained as power differences between the sexes based on their traditional roles in a social hierarchy. That is, if gender and power are confounded such that women typically occupy lower status social roles compared to men, it is possible that observed sex differences are better accounted for by power differentials than by biological differences. Under conditions of equal power, women’s and men’s behavior and cognition might be more similar than previously believed. The present data indicated that random assignment to write a powerful or powerless narrative, not participant gender, contributed to a significant difference in communication about work and a marginal difference in communication about sex. Future research should further test the prospect that power can explain differences in behavior and cognition previously attributed to gender.

Limitations

The present research is not without limitations that should be addressed in future investigations. LIWC software provides proportions of communication about categories such as negative emotionality, work, and sex, but the software does not describe how participants discussed these categories. For example, women and men wrote proportionally equal amounts about sex, but it is possible that they wrote about qualitatively unique aspects of sexual experiences. To further test the prediction that gender differences are minimized by equal power (Eagly & Wood, 1999), future research should qualitatively examine the contents of participant narratives to further contextualize the present quantitative findings. Multimethod approaches to exploring power-related narratives are necessary to further develop understandings of the power construct and the effects of common power manipulations.

A limitation of the present mediation analysis is that it is not causal. We caution readers to interpret the model as exploratory and intended to illustrate correlational associations between LIWC categories represented in participants’ written narratives. The model is not causal due to the lack of temporal precedence among the variables (Kendall et al., 2017). That is, participants’ written narratives served as the source of measurements of communication about work (M1), communication about sex (M2), and expressions of negative emotionality (Y); thus, activation of the mediating constructs did not occur prior to the measurement of the outcome variable. This model represents a theoretical understanding of variable relationships informed by prior research (Cho & Keltner, 2020; Keltner et al., 2003; Livingston & Vik, 2021; Vik & Livingston, 2022). Future research should establish temporal precedence using surveys and experimental approaches to replicate or falsify relationships drawn from this model.

Finally, the present analysis is non-exhaustive. The LIWC dictionary contains dozens more categories that were outside the scope of the present study, but which future research could fruitfully explore. Such explorations should be guided by theory and past findings to further clarify the roots and reach of power and powerlessness.

Conclusion

The consistent effects of power on affect, behavior, and cognition make the construct arguably one of humanity’s strongest drive states. Power inspired hundreds of empirical investigations in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, leading to the development of the most common manipulation of feelings of power, which invites participants to write about a time they felt powerful or powerless according to random assignment (Galinsky et al., 2003, 2015). The current study contributed to a scarce but growing body of research examining the contents of participants’ narratives for clues regarding the predictors and consequences of feeling powerful and powerless. Modest differences in emotional expression between women and men indicated that power research should report analyses including gender as a control variable. However, power condition and self-reported feelings of power were most strongly associated with narrative contents, especially in the domains of negative emotionality, work, and sex. The present findings provide direction to the next wave of power research, which should examine organizations and sexual relationships as the contexts in which power dynamics are most salient and report on interactions with gender.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tyler N. Livingston

Author Biographies

Tyler N. Livingston, Ph.D., is a social psychologist who studies power and decision-making.

Tennley A. Vik, Ph.D., is a communication scholar who studies interpersonal communication about disclosure and sexuality.

Jonathan Singer, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who studies psychological health in aging and illness.

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