What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: An appraisal perspective on person perception

Abstract

The present research aimed to assess how people use knowledge about the emotional reactions of others to make inferences about their character. Specifically, we postulate that people can reconstruct or ''reverse engineer'' the appraisals underlying an emotional reaction and use this appraisal information to draw person perception inferences. As predicted, a person who reacted with anger to blame was perceived as more aggressive, and self-confident, but also as less warm and gentle than a person who reacted with sadness (Study 1). A person who reacted with a smile (Study 1) or remained neutral (Study 2) was perceived as self-confident but also as unemotional. These perceptions were mediated by perceived appraisals.

Understanding emotionally relevant situations in primary dental practice. 2. Reported effects of emotionally charged situations

“…Experimental Page 12 evidence suggests that people who respond to an obviously difficult situation with a smile are perceived by observers as being more self-confident, but also 'above the situation', unemotional and 'cold' ie less warm or gentle 46 . There is evidence that patients don't like physicians to behave in a neutral way; they prefer a display of supportive emotions, in particular, reassurance and a lack of hostility.…”

Communicating Moral Motives

“…Based on an effect size (d = .91) in similar research on emotion communication (Hareli & Hess, 2010), a power analysis using GPower 3.1.9.2., recommended a sample size of 66 at 95% power. This was increased by 25% to allow for incomplete responses and exclusions based on an attention check question.…”

How Does a Caller’s Anger, Fear and Sadness Affect Operators’ Decisions in Emergency Calls?

“…Operators are thus specifically attentive to this signal. Second, given that emotions are disruptive reactions to events and serve to assist in making inferences about others (Hareli & Hess, 2010;Van Kleef, DeDreu & Manstead, 2010), the understanding of verbal expressions may hinge on emotional expressions, rather than the other way around. Thus, the influence of particularly intensely expressed fear emotions must not be overlooked.…”

“…Nonetheless, a growing body of research addresses how discrete emotional expressions are vital for decision making in other organizational settings (Van Kleef, DeDreu & Manstead, 2010;Van Kleef, Homan & Cheshin, 2012). In that research, emotional expressions are social signals that inform perceivers about both the characteristics of the expresser and particularities of the setting (Hareli & Hess, 2010).…”

“…Nonetheless, a growing body of research addresses how discrete emotional expressions are vital for decision making in other organizational settings (Van Kleef, DeDreu & Manstead, 2010;Van Kleef, Homan & Cheshin, 2012). In that research, emotional expressions are social signals that inform perceivers about both the characteristics of the expresser and particularities of the setting (Hareli & Hess, 2010).Using a narrow scope of emotions, such as the level of "hysteria", and a joint measure for emotions and decision making, as was done in previous emergency operator studies, the work of Eisenberg et al (1986), Clawson and Sinclair (2001) and Ma et al (2007), 1 stands in contrast to the more recent studies by Van Kleef, DeDreu and Manstead (2010) and Hareli and Hess (2010) on the role of discrete emotions. Making aggregated assessments of emotional expression in calls about a certain decision category (cardiac arrest), rather than focusing on different types of emotions in relation to a range of emergency decisions, raises the risk of not capturing the true influence of emotional expressions on emergency assessment.…”