Ursula Hess - The Social Nature of Emotion Expression: What Emotions Can Tell Us About the World

Editors

Ursula Hess and Shlomo Hareli

The Social Nature of Emotion Expression

What Emotions Can Tell Us About the World

Editors

Ursula Hess

Department of Psychology, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Shlomo Hareli

Department of Business Administration, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

ISBN 978-3-030-32967-9 e-ISBN 978-3-030-32968-6

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32968-6

Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

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Contents

Ursula Hess and Shlomo Hareli

Agneta H. Fischer , Lisanne S. Pauw and Antony S. R. Manstead

Daniel N. Albohn , Joseph C. Brandenburg and Reginald B. Adams Jr.

Andrea Scarantino

Jennifer M. Knothe and Eric A. Walle

Shlomo Hareli and Ursula Hess

Brian Parkinson

Jonathan Gratch and Celso M. de Melo

W. Gerrod Parrott

Marianne Schmid Mast and Tristan Palese

Shlomo Hareli , Simon Elkabetz and Ursula Hess

Heather J. MacArthur and Stephanie A. Shields

Magdalena Rychlowska , Antony S. R. Manstead and Job van der Schalk

List of Figures

List of Tables

Contributors

Reginald B. Adams Jr.

Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Daniel N. Albohn

Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Joseph C. Brandenburg

Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Simon Elkabetz

University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Agneta H. Fischer

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Jonathan Gratch

Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Playa Vista, CA, USA

Shlomo Hareli

Department of Business Administration, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Ursula Hess

Department of Psychology, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Jennifer M. Knothe

University of California, Merced, CA, USA

Heather J. MacArthur

Department of Psychology, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA

The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

Antony S. R. Manstead

School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Marianne Schmid Mast

University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Celso M. de Melo

US Army Research Laboratory, Playa Vista, CA, USA

Tristan Palese

University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Brian Parkinson

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

W. Gerrod Parrott

Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Lisanne S. Pauw

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Magdalena Rychlowska

School of Psychology, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, UK

Andrea Scarantino

Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Job van der Schalk

School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Stephanie A. Shields

Department of Psychology, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA

The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

Eric A. Walle

University of California, Merced, CA, USA

In everyday life, we are surrounded by people who experience and express emotions. In fact, even trivial interactions such as paying for purchases in a store often involve some level of social exchange and it is rare that an interaction is bereft of emotional exchanges. Accuracy in emotion perception helps coordinate and facilitate interpersonal communication and provides the necessary affective glue between people (Feldman et al. , Albohn, Brandenburg, & Adams extend the process of emotion perception to neutral faces , which are often processed b observers in the same way as are emotional faces.

In recent years, research on emotion expressions has changed from studies that presented carefully curated facial expressions from which all context information has been removed (sometimes to the point of only showing ovals with the facial interior) to acknowledging that emotion recognition is a social act (e.g., Fischer, Pauw & Manstead, this book) which occurs in social contexts (Barrett et al. ).

In fact, constructivist theories of emotion consider context to be of preeminent importance when it comes to constructing meaning from emotional exchanges (for an overview see e.g., Faucher ).

Recently, we proposed that this influence is bidirectional (Hess et al. ). That is, just as the context influences the interpretation of facial expressions , these expressions have sufficient intrinsic meaning to conversely influence the interpretation of the situation that elicited them.

This notion that both emotion expressions and context provide valid and complementary information can be derived from appraisal theories of emotion . According to appraisal theories of emotion , emotions are elicited and differentiated through a series of appraisals of (internal or external) stimulus events based on the perceived nature of the event (e.g., Frijda ).