Communicating appraisals and social motives: Interpersonal effects of regulated and unregulated emotion expression

This project investigates how one person's emotional expressions affect other people's perceptions of the motives behind his or her actions. We also focus on people's attempts to control their expressions in order to communicate or disguise their motives, and how perceivers factor in their sense that expressions are regulated before responding to them. For example, if you believe that my sorrow concerning your misfortune is insincere rather than sincere, your perceptions of my motives and response to my actions is likely to be different. The guiding idea of the research is that emotions communicate information about what people are trying to achieve and about their evaluations of possible outcomes (appraisals).

Our studies will focus on the impact of emotion communication and miscommunication on trust and cooperation between individuals and groups. We make use of experimental games in which there is a tension between motives to act in one's own self-interest and motives to act in the interests of one or more other people. Access to emotional information during these games is controlled using video-mediation and/or "virtual confederates" (avatars programmed either to capture participants' facial movements, or to display prespecified emotions). Our basic premise is that emotional expressions during experimental games (a) influence whether people make self-interested or other-interested decisions through their influence on perceived trustworthiness, (b) are regulated by players in order to communicate prosocial motives despite behaviour that appears to be self-interested, (c) are likely to be misinterpreted in situations where there are motives for players to misrepresent their true feelings, and (d) give rise to different interpersonal consequences depending on whether perceivers think that the expressions have been regulated.

We will also explore the operation of similar processes in more naturalistic scenarios, allowing us to assess the applicability of our findings in other kinds of social interactions. The research will advance theoretical thinking about the role of emotions in social interaction and will have implications for a broad range of everyday settings in which emotional displays influence social behaviour, such as negotiation, conflict resolution, resource dilemmas, and service industries in which there is emotional labour (e.g., customer relations).

Intellectual merit

This project will advance interdisciplinary research on the role of emotions in social interaction. We anticipate that our findings will make important theoretical contributions to understanding the function emotions play in social cognition and social problem solving, and carry implications for a broad range of settings, including negotiation, conflict resolution, and fields employing "emotional labour" (e.g., sales and customer relations). Our work also has implications for rational frameworks for studying cooperation, such as game theory, which largely downplay the role of signalling, and by extension, research on computer systems that either interact with people or allow people to interact with each other via some restrictive communication channel. From a methodological perspective, the research will result in new methodological tools - virtual confederates - for studying human social processes.


Broader impact

Communicating beyond academia: We will design and maintain a website to communicate the aims and objectives of the project in a way that is accessible to non-academics. As findings become available, they will be posted on the website, along with working papers and conference presentations. Wherever feasible, we will seek to publish our academic papers in Open Access journals, or to make full-text versions freely available in university on-line repositories.
Enhancing Infrastructure for Research and Education: The virtual confederates and experimental games developed here are powerful methodological tools for studying human social processes. Versions of the software will be made available via a free non-commercial license to the research community. The PIs already have a strong track record in this regard. For example, Prof. Gratch has been involved in the free distribution of tools and research tutorials related to the construction of virtual humans (http://vhtoolkit.ict.usc.edu/index.php/Main_Page) and data collected under NSF-funded studies (e.g., http://rapport.ict.usc.edu).

Advancing discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training and learning: Research conducted by all teams will inform training of undergraduate and graduate students. We also anticipate our findings to have direct relevance for communication-skills training. This can occur both through theoretical contributions that inform practice, and in the development of technology that can directly be used in teaching. For example, the experimental games used in this proposal are in widespread use to teach negotiation, teamwork, leadership and emotional intelligence (e.g., see the course materials produced by Northwestern University's Dispute Resolution Research Center). The research on virtual confederates could significantly enhance the capabilities of these teaching methods and their applicability to distance- and home-learning settings. The PIs have proven experience in achieving such transitions (such as the NSF-funded installation in the Boston Museum of Science - http://www.mos.org/interfaces/).

Interdisciplinary training and under-represented groups: We plan to support the activities of at least one intern from a Historically Black College or Minority Institution (HBCU-MI). Prof. Gratch's institute has a long-standing internship program with several HBCU-MI's. Indeed, a recent intern (Geovany Ramirez from UT-El Paso) won the "emotion challenge" at the 2011 International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. The project will train several researchers (postdocs and doctoral students) in interdisciplinary research.