The Social Effects of Emotions van Kleef, Gerben A; Côté, Stéphane
Annual review of psychology,
01/2022, Volume:
73, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We review the burgeoning literature on the social effects of emotions, documenting the impact of emotional expressions on observers' affect, cognition, and behavior. We find convergent evidence that ...emotional expressions influence observers' affective reactions, inferential processes, and behaviors across various domains, including close relationships, group decision making, customer service, negotiation, and leadership. Affective reactions and inferential processes mediate the effects of emotional expressions on observers' behaviors, and the relative potency of these mediators depends on the observers' information processing and the perceived appropriateness of the emotional expressions. The social effects of emotions are similar across expressive modalities (face, voice, body, text, symbols). We discuss the findings in relation to emotional contagion, emotional intelligence, emotion regulation, emotions as social information (EASI) theory, and the functionality of emotions in engendering social influence. Finally, we identify gaps in our current understanding of the topic and call for interdisciplinary collaboration and methodological diversification.
What motivates people to regulate the emotions of others? Prior research has shown that people are motivated to regulate the emotions of others to make others feel better. This investigation, ...however, was designed to test whether people are also motivated to regulate the emotions of others to promote personal instrumental benefits. We tested whether participants would be motivated to increase unpleasant (Studies 1–3) or pleasant (Study 3) emotions in others, when they expected to benefit from doing so. We found that participants tried to increase an emotion in others when it was expected to lead to desirable outcomes, but decrease an emotion in others when it was expected to lead to undesirable outcomes. These instrumental motives were found even when they led participants to make their partners feel worse and their rivals feel better. Furthermore, the more participants expected others' emotions to result in behaviors that would personally benefit (or harm) participants themselves, the more they were motivated to increase (or decrease) the corresponding emotion in others. These findings demonstrate the operation of instrumental motives in regulating the emotions of others, whether friends of foes.
•People regulate the emotions of others to achieve personal instrumental benefits.•People can make both friends and foes feel bad, if they expect to benefit from it.•Interpersonal regulation may depend on the perceived utility of others' emotions.
Emotions are an elemental part of life - they imbue our existence with meaning and purpose, and influence how we engage with the world around us. But we do not just feel our own emotions; we ...typically express them in the presence of other people. How do our emotional expressions affect others? Moving beyond the traditional intrapersonal perspective, this is the first book dedicated to exploring the pervasive interpersonal dynamics of emotions. Integrating existing theory and research, van Kleef develops the Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, a groundbreaking comprehensive framework that explains how emotional expressions influence observers across all domains of life, from close relationships to group settings, conflict and negotiation, customer service, and leader-follower relations. His deeply social perspective sheds new light on the fundamental question of why we have emotions in the first place - the social influence emotions engender may very well constitute their raison d'être.
The idea that emotions regulate social interaction is increasingly popular. But exactly how do emotions do this? To address this question, I draw on research on the interpersonal effects of emotions ...on behavior in personal relationships, parent—child interactions, conflict, negotiation, and leadership, and propose a new framework that can account for existing findings and guide future research: the emotions as social information (EASI) model. I demonstrate that emotional expressions affect observers' behavior by triggering inferential processes and/or affective reactions in them. The predictive strength of these two processes—which may inspire different behaviors—depends on the observer's information processing and on social-relational factors. Examples of moderators that determine the relative predictive strength of inferences and affective reactions include power, need for cognitive closure, time pressure, display rules, and the appropriateness and target of the emotional expression, which are all discussed.
Prejudiced attitudes and political nationalism vary widely around the world, but there has been little research on what predicts this variation. Here we examine the ecological and cultural factors ...underlying the worldwide distribution of prejudice. We suggest that cultures grow more prejudiced when they tighten cultural norms in response to destabilizing ecological threats. A set of seven archival analyses, surveys, and experiments (∑N = 3,986,402) find that nations, American states, and pre-industrial societies with tighter cultural norms show the most prejudice based on skin color, religion, nationality, and sexuality, and that tightness predicts why prejudice is often highest in areas of the world with histories of ecological threat. People's support for cultural tightness also mediates the link between perceived ecological threat and intentions to vote for nationalist politicians. Results replicate when controlling for economic development, inequality, conservatism, residential mobility, and shared cultural heritage. These findings offer a cultural evolutionary perspective on prejudice, with implications for immigration, intercultural conflict, and radicalization.
We examined how leader emotional displays affect team performance. We developed and tested the idea that effects of leader displays of anger versus happiness depend on followers' epistemic ...motivation, which is the desire to develop a thorough understanding of a situation. Experimental data on four-person teams engaged in an interdependent team task showed that teams with higher epistemic motivation performed better when their leaders displayed anger (mediated by team members' performance inferences), whereas teams with lower epistemic motivation performed better when the leaders expressed happiness (mediated by team members' affective reactions). Theoretical contributions and managerial ramifications are discussed.
In 3 studies with student samples, we advance a social‐motivational approach to gossip. We developed the Motives to Gossip Questionnaire to distinguish negative influence, information gathering and ...validation, social enjoyment, and group protection as motives underlying gossip. Study 1 demonstrated that these motives can be distinguished empirically, and that the informational motive was the most prevalent reason to instigate gossip. Study 2 showed that group protection was especially important when the opportunity to gossip with a group member about another member's norm‐violating behavior was salient. Study 3 showed that when participants imagined someone gossiped to them about another group member's norm violation, and ascribed this to group protection, they rated the gossip as social and did not disapprove of it.
Responses to norm violators are poorly understood. On one hand, norm violators are perceived as powerful, which may help them to get ahead. On the other hand, norm violators evoke moral outrage, ...which may frustrate their upward social mobility. We addressed this paradox by considering the role of culture. Collectivistic cultures value group harmony and tight cultures value social order. We therefore hypothesized that collectivism and tightness moderate reactions to norm violators. We presented 2,369 participants in 19 countries with a norm violation or a norm adherence scenario. In individualistic cultures, norm violators were considered more powerful than norm abiders and evoked less moral outrage, whereas in collectivistic cultures, norm violators were considered less powerful and evoked more moral outrage. Moreover, respondents in tighter cultures expressed a stronger preference for norm followers as leaders. Cultural values thus influence responses to norm violators, which may have downstream consequences for violators’ hierarchical positions.
Emotions are part and parcel of the human condition, but their nature is debated. Three broad classes of theories about the nature of emotions can be distinguished: affect-program theories, ...constructionist theories, and appraisal theories. Integrating these broad classes of theories into a unifying theory is challenging. An integrative psychometric model of emotions can inform such a theory because psychometric models are intertwined with theoretical perspectives about constructs. To identify an integrative psychometric model, we delineate properties of emotions stated by emotion theories and investigate whether psychometric models account for these properties. Specifically, an integrative psychometric model of emotions should allow (a) identifying distinct emotions (central in affect-program theories), (b) between- and within-person variations of emotions (central in constructionist theories), and (c) causal relationships between emotion components (central in appraisal theories). Evidence suggests that the popular reflective and formative latent variable models—in which emotions are conceptualized as unobservable causes or consequences of emotion components—cannot account for all properties. Conversely, a psychometric network model—in which emotions are conceptualized as systems of causally interacting emotion components—accounts for all properties. The psychometric network model thus constitutes an integrative psychometric model of emotions, facilitating progress toward a unifying theory.
Power is an inherent characteristic of social interaction, yet research has yet to fully explain what power and power dispersion may mean for conflict resolution in work groups. We found in a field ...study of 42 organizational work groups and a laboratory study of 40 negotiating dyads that the effects of power dispersion on conflict resolution are contingent on the level of interactants' power, thereby explaining contradictory theory and findings on power dispersion. We found that when members have low power, power dispersion is positively related to conflict resolution, but when members have high power, power dispersion is negatively related to conflict resolution (i.e., power equality is better). These findings can be explained by the mediating role of intragroup power struggles. Together, these findings suggest that power hierarchies function as a heuristic solution for conflict and contribute to adaptive social dynamics in groups with low, but not high, levels of power.
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