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Inferring Intentions from Emotion Expressions in Social Decision Making

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The Social Nature of Emotion Expression

Abstract

In the last decade we have seen increasing experimental evidence that people make important inferences from emotion expressions about others’ intentions in situations of interdependent decision making. Reverse appraisal has been proposed as one mechanism whereby people retrieve, from emotion displays, information about how others are appraising the ongoing interaction (e.g., does my counterpart find the current outcome to be goal conducive? Does s/he blame me for it?); in turn, from these appraisal attributions, people make inferences about the others’ goals (e.g., is my counterpart likely to cooperate?) that shape their decision making. Here we review experimental evidence and progress that has been done in understanding this inferential mechanism and its relationship to other mechanisms for the interpersonal effects of emotion (e.g., emotional contagion and social appraisal). We discuss theoretical implications for our understanding of the role of emotion expression on human decision making, but also practical implications for the growing industry of socially intelligent machines (e.g., personal digital assistants and social robots).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Yet another related mechanism is social referencing , where others’ emotional expressions are used to calibrate one’s appraisals against a target object - for instance, when a toddler uses the mother’s expression to decide whether to cross a fake visual cliff (Sorce et al. 1985). However, for details on this mechanism and how it relates to social appraisal see Parkinson’s chapter, in this volume.

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Correspondence to Jonathan Gratch .

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Gratch, J., de Melo, C.M. (2019). Inferring Intentions from Emotion Expressions in Social Decision Making. In: Hess, U., Hareli, S. (eds) The Social Nature of Emotion Expression . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32968-6_8

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