The Scorn of Status: A Bias Toward Perceiving Anger on High-Status Faces

Abstract

The expression of anger is an important signal of both danger and threat to social relationships. furthermore, anger expressed by high-status people should be especially apparent due to the fact that high-status people may be perceived as more able to act on their intentions than low-status people. In the current research, we test the hypothesis that a perceiver will be biased toward anger appearing on the face of a high-status compared to a low-status face. Using an emotion detection task across two experiments, our findings revealed that White participants perceived anger to persist longer (Study 1) and appear sooner (Study 2) on the faces of high-status compared to low-status targets. This suggests that social context, in general, and social status (as indicated by occupation), in particular, can influence the perception of anger.

The Role of Social Context for the Interpretation of Emotional Facial Expressions

“…Thus, knowing that a person is a man or a women or a member of a specific ethnic group or has high versus low status all impacts on emotion perception (Hess et al 1997;Hugenberg and Bodenhausen 2003;Ratcliff et al 2012). From our perspective, these findings are special cases of the larger influence of social rules and norms.…”

“…In this case, any social category that the perceiver is aware of and for which expectations regarding emotional reactions exist can affect emotion identification (Kirouac and Hess 1999) in that the perceiver is more likely to attribute the more expected emotion evidenced in the ambiguous expression. For example, knowing that a (male) expresser is black or of high status leads observers to more readily label their expression as angry (Hugenberg and Bodenhausen 2003;Ratcliff et al 2012).…”

The Impact of Context on the Perception of Emotions

“…In this case, any social category that the perceiver is aware of and for which expectations regarding emotional reactions exist, can affect emotion identification (Kirouac & Hess, 1999) in that the perceiver is more likely to attribute the more expected emotion evidenced in the ambiguous expression. For example, knowing that a (male) expresser is black or of high status leads observers to more readily label their expression as angry (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003;Ratcliff, Franklin, Nelson Jr., & Vescio, 2012). In the same vein, when a person is identified as a surgeon participants rate the facial expressions of the person as less intensely emotional than the same person and expressions when associated with a different identity, following the stereotype The impact of context 9 expectation that surgeons control and restrain their emotions (Hareli, David, & Hess, 2013).…”

Status and Power Do Not Modulate Automatic Imitation of Intransitive Hand Movements

“…Previous research has demonstrated that that social status can affect gaze following [ 36 , 92 ] and that being primed with a sense of power leads to slower motor responding ([ 39 ] and experiment 5 of the current paper). In addition, several other studies have shown more subtle effects of power and status on gaze fixation [ 93 ], emotion recognition [ 94 ] and autonomic nervous system responding [ 95 ]. These collective findings suggest that the null effects of power and status on AI found in our experiments are specific to mimicry (of finger movements), rather than generalising to other forms of social behaviour.…”