New paper on the power of emotion expression with Jess Tracy and Jeff Markusoff in PSPB

 

Jessica Tracy, Jeff Markusoff and I have a new paper just accepted to Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin looking at the degree to which emotion expressions can shape our everyday judgments of people–even in the face of contradictory information.

You can download an ‘in press’ version of the paper here, and read the abstract below:

 

How do we decide who merits social status? According to functionalist theories of emotion, the nonverbal expressions of pride and shame play a key role, functioning as automatically perceived status signals. In this view, observers automatically make status inferences about expressers on the basis of these expressions, even when contradictory contextual information about the expressers’ status is available. In four studies, we tested whether implicit and explicit status perceptions are influenced by pride and shame expressions even when these expressions’ status-related messages are contradicted by contextual information. Results indicate that emotion expressions powerfully influence both implicit and explicit status inferences, at times neutralizing or even overriding situational knowledge. These findings demonstrate the irrepressible communicative power of emotion displays, and indicate that status judgments can be informed as much (and often more) by automatic responses to nonverbal expressions of emotion as by rational, contextually bound knowledge.