All people have first-hand knowledge of the importance of emotional expressions in our face-to-face encounters with each other. We trust others partly on the basis of their expressed emotions and in turn, those expressions can help to us to coordinate with different people's actions and intentions. Yet we also know that expressions can be manipulated--people can mask or shape their emotion presentations in order to conceal or disguise their motives, or to protect the feelings of their social partners. Just as we are aware of the importance of emotional expressions we also know they can be manipulated. This awareness means we often refuse to take expressions at face value. This refusal is a double-edged sword--it can protect us from exploitation but can also undermine the effectiveness of communication, especially when misjudge authentic expressions as inauthentic.
This project extends prior research on emotional signaling by examining social situations with the potential for emotion regulation. Specifically, the investigators believe that: a) emotion expressions communicate information about the sender's motives; b) senders are sensitive to these communicative effects and regulate their emotion expressions in order to shape their impact on receivers (e.g., to communicate empathy or exert social influence); and c) receivers are aware that these signals may be regulated or inauthentic, and may factor this in when responding to perceived expressions. Thus, the central aim of this project is to investigate how the expression of emotion affects other people's perceptions of the motives guiding behavior, and how the actual and perceived regulation of emotion expression moderates these effects. These questions will be explored through a mixture of naturalistic situations (e.g., doctor-patient interviews) and experimental games (e.g., prisoner's dilemma) in which the respective roles of different interacting individuals or groups can be manipulated, incentives for emotion-regulation can be shaped, and modes of communication may be selectively controlled. These questions will be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining traditional experimental methods in social psychology with modelling and simulation approaches in computer science.
