Abstract
Emotions shown by others inform us about the expresser and the situation at hand as well as the relevant norms and standards. As such, emotional expressions are an important source for social information. This chapter will summarize the reverse engineering model, which describes how the naïve theory that people hold about the appraisals patterns of emotions as well as the action tendencies associated with them, is used do draw such inferences. Because emotions are perceived in specific contexts, the chapter discusses how context contributes to this process. Also, the chapter considers how reverse engineering is linked to the related process of social appraisal. The chapter explains the process of the reverse engineering of dispositional inferences based on emotion expressions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Arnold, M. B. (1960). Emotion and personnality. Oxford: Columbia University Press.
Aue, T., Flykt, A., & Scherer, K. R. (2007). First evidence for differential and sequential efferent effects of goal relevance and goal conduciveness appraisal. Biological Psychology, 74, 347–357. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.09.001.
Bar, M., Neta, M., & Linz, H. (2006). Very first impressions. Emotion, 6, 269–278. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.6.2.269.
Brescoll, V., & Uhlmann, E. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. Psychological Science, 19, 268–275. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=2136805830412031019related:K1Sx25R1px0J.
Campos, J. J., & Stenberg, C. (1981). Perception, appraisal, and emotion: The onset of social referencing infant social cognition. In M. E. Lamb & L. R. Sherrod (Eds.), Infant social cognition: Empirical and theoretical contributions (pp. 217–314). Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Clément, F., & Dukes, D. (2017). Social appraisal and social referencing: Two components of affective social learning. Emotion Review, 9(3), 253–261. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916661634.
de Melo, C. M., Carnevale, P. J., Read, S. J., & Gratch, J. (2014). Reading people’s minds from emotion expressions in interdependent decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(1), 73–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034251.
Darwin, C. (1872/1965). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Originally published, 1872).
Fischer, A., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2008). The social function of emotions. In M. Lewis, J. Haviland-Jones, & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (Vol. 3, pp. 456–468). New York: Guilford Press.
Fiske, S. T. (2004). Social beings: A core motives approach to social psychology. New York: Wiley.
Folkes, V. S. (1982). Communicating the reasons for social rejection. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 235–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022–1031(82)90052-X.
Fontaine, J. R. J., Scherer, K. R., Roesch, E. B., & Ellsworth, P. C. (2007). The world of emotions in not two-dimensional. Psychological Science, 18, 1050–1057. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02024.x.
Försterling, F. (2001). Attribution: An introduction to theories, research, and applications. Hove: Psychology Press.
Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frijda, N. H., Kuipers, P., & ter Shure, E. (1989). Relations among emotion appraisal and emotional action readiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 212–228. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.2.212.
Greenaway, K. H., Kalokerinos, E. K., Murphy, S. C., & McIlroy, T. (2018). Winners are grinners: Expressing authentic positive emotion enhances status in performance contexts. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.03.013.
Gunaydin, G., Selcuk, E., & Zayas, V. (2017). Impressions based on a portrait predict, 1-month later, impressions following a live interaction. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(1), 36–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616662123.
Hareli, S. (2014). Making sense of the social world and influencing it by using a naïve attribution theory of emotions. Emotion Review, 6(4), 336–343. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073914534501.
Hareli, S., & Hess, U. (2010). What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: An appraisal perspective on person perception. Cognition and Emotion, 24, 128–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930802613828.
Hareli, S., & Weiner, B. (2002). Social emotions and personality inferences: A scaffold for a new direction in the study of achievement motivation. Educational Psychologist, 37(3), 183–193. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985ep3703_4.
Hareli, S., Shomrat, N., & Hess, U. (2009). Emotional versus neutral expressions and perceptions of social dominance and submissiveness. Emotion, 9, 378–384. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015958.
Hareli, S., Moran-Amir, O., David, S., & Hess, U. (2013). Emotions as signals of normative conduct. Cognition & Emotion, 27(8), 1395–1404. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2013.791615.
Hareli, S., Kafetsios, K., & Hess, U. (2015). A cross-cultural study on emotion expression and the learning of social norms. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01501.
Hareli, S., Halhal, M., & Hess, U. (2018). Dyadic dynamics: The impact of emotional responses to facial expressions on the perception of power. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1993. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01993.
Hareli, S., Elkabetz, S., & Hess, U. (2019). Drawing inferences from emotion expressions: The role of situative informativeness and context. Emotion, 19, 200–208. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000368.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.
Hess, U. (2014). Anger is a positive emotion. In W. G. Parrott (Ed.), The positive side of negative emotions (pp. 55–75). New York: Guilford Press.
Hess, U., & Hareli, S. (2015). The influence of context on emotion recognition in humans. Paper presented at the proceedings of the 11th IEEE international conference on automatic face and gesture recognition, Ljubljana, May 4–7.
Hess, U., & Hareli, S. (2016). The impact of context on the perception of emotions. In C. Abell & J. Smith (Eds.), The expression of emotion: Philosophical, psychological, and legal perspectives (pp. 199–218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hess, U., & Hareli, S. (2017). The social signal value of emotions: The role of contextual factors in social inferences drawn from emotion displays. In J. A. Russell & J.-M. Fernandez-Dols (Eds.), The psychology of facial expression (pp. 375–392). New-York: Oxford.
Hess, U., Blairy, S., & Kleck, R. E. (2000). The influence of expression intensity, gender, and ethnicity on judgments of dominance and affiliation. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 24, 265–283. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0165.
Hess, U., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Kleck, R. E. (2009). The face is not an empty canvas: How facial expressions interact with facial appearance. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B, 364, 3497–3504. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0165.
Hess, U., David, S., & Hareli, S. (2016). Emotional restraint is good for men only: The influence of emotional retraint on the perception of competence. Emotion, 16, 208–213. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000125.
Kappas, A. (2006). Appraisals are direct, immediate, intuitive, and unwitting…and some are reflective. Cognition and Emotion, 20(7), 952–975. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930600616080.
Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 192–238). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Kelley, H. H. (1972). Casual schemata and the attribution process. New York: General Learning Press.
Knutson, B. (1996). Facial expressions of emotion influence interpersonal trait inferences. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 20, 165–182. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02281954.
Kun, A., & Weiner, B. (1973). Necessary versus sufficient causal schemata for success and failure. Journal of Research in Personality, 7(3), 197–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-6566(73)90036-6.
Kelley, H. H. (1971). Attribution in social interaction. In E. E. Jones, D. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Morristown, N. J: General Learning Press.
Lanctôt, N., & Hess, U. (2007). The timing of appraisals. Emotion, 7, 207–212. https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.7.1.207.
Lerner, J. S., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2006). Portrait of the angry decision maker: How appraisal tendencies shape anger’s influence on cognition. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 115–137. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.515.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, K. M. (2000). When leaders display emotion: How followers respond to negative emotional expression of male and female leaders. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21, 221–234. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1379(200003)21:2%3C221::AID-JOB36%3E3.0.CO;2-0.
Manstead, A. S. R., & Fischer, A. H. (2001). Social appraisal: The social world as object of and influence on appraisal processes. In K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr, & T. Johnstone (Eds.), Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods, research (pp. 221–232). New York: Oxford University Press.
Manstead, A. S. R., & Fischer, A. H. (2017). Social referencing and social appraisal: Commentary on the Clément and Dukes (2016) and Walle et al. (2016) articles. Emotion Review, 9(3), 262–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916669843.
Motley, M. T., & Camden, C. T. (1988). Facial expression of emotion: A comparison of posed expressions versus spontaneous expressions in an interpersonal communications setting. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 52, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570318809389622.
Niedenthal, P. M., & Brauer, M. (2012). Social functionality of human emotion. Annual Review of Psychology, 63(1), 259–285. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131605.
Parkinson, B. (1997). Untangling the appraisal-emotion connection. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1(1), 62–79. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0101_5.
Parkinson, B. (2011). Interpersonal emotion transfer: Contagion and social appraisal. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5, 428–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00365.x.
Parkinson, B., & Manstead, A. S. R. (1993). Making sense of emotion in stories and social life. Cognition and Emotion, 7, 295–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939308409191.
Parkinson, B., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2015). Current emotion research in social psychology: Thinking about emotions and other people. Emotion Review, 7(4), 371–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073915590624.
Robinson, M. D., & Clore, G. L. (2002). Belief and feeling: Evidence for an accessibility model of emotional self-report. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 934–960. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.6.934.
Roseman, I. J. (1991). Appraisal determinants of discrete emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 5, 161–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939108411034.
Roseman, I. J., Spindel, M. S., & Jose, P. E. (1990). Appraisals of emotion-eliciting events: Testing a theory of discrete emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(5), 899–915. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.5.899.
Roseman, I. J., Wiest, C., & Swartz, T. S. (1994). Phenomenology, behaviors, and goals differentiate discrete emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 206–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.2.206.
Scherer, K. R. (1984). On the nature and function of emotion: A component process approach. In K. R. Scherer & P. Ekman (Eds.), Approaches to emotion (pp. 293–317). Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Scherer, K. R. (1987). Towards a dynamic theory of emotion: The component process model of affective states. Geneva Studies in Emotion and Communication, 1, 1–98. Retrieved from http://www.affective-sciences.org/node/402.
Scherer, K. R. (1992). What does facial expression express? In K. Strongman (Ed.), International review of studies on emotion (Vol. 2, pp. 139–165). Chichester: Wiley.
Scherer, K. R. (2005). What are emotions? and how can they be measured? Social Science Information, 44(4), 695. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018405058216.
Scherer, K. R., & Grandjean, D. (2008). Facial expressions allow inference of both emotions and their components. Cognition & Emotion, 22, 789–801. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930701516791.
Scherer, K. R., Mortillaro, M., Rotondi, I., Sergi, I., & Trznadel, S. (2018). Appraisal-driven facial actions as building blocks for emotion inference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(3), 358–379. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000107.
Smith, C. A., & Scott, H. S. (1997). A componential approach to the meaning of facial expressions. In J. A. Russell & J.-M. Fernández-Dols (Eds.), The psychology of facial expression (pp. 229–254). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tiedens, L. Z. (2001). Anger and advancement versus sadness and subjugation: The effect of negative emotion expressions on social status conferral. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 86–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.80.1.86.
Tiedens, L. Z., Ellsworth, P. C., & Mesquita, B. (2000). Stereotypes about sentiments and status: Emotional expectations for high- and low-status group members. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 500–574.
Todorov, A., Dotsch, R., Porter, J. M., Oosterhof, N. N., & Falvello, V. B. (2013). Validation of data-driven computational models of social perception of faces. Emotion, 13(4), 724–738. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032335.
Trope, Y. (1986). Identification and inferential processes in dispositional attribution. Psychological Review, 93, 239–257. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.93.3.239.
Van Kleef, G. A. (2009). How emotions regulate social life: The Emotions as Social Information (EASI) model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(3), 184–188. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01633.x.
Van Kleef, G. A. (2010). The emerging view of emotion as social information. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00262.x.
Walle, E. A., Reschke, P. J., & Knothe, J. M. (2017). Social referencing: Defining and delineating a basic process of emotion. Emotion Review, 9(3), 245–252. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916669594.
Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 95, 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548.
Weiner, B. (1987). The social psychology of emotion: Applications of a naive psychology. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 5, 405–419. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.1987.5.4.405.
Weiner, B. (1992). Human motivation: Metaphors, theories, and research. Newbury Park: Sage.
Weiner, B. (2014). The attribution approach to emotion and motivation: History, hypotheses, home runs, headaches/heartaches. Emotion Review, 6, 353–361. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073914534502.
Weiner, B., Graham, S., Stern, P., & Lawson, M. E. (1982). Using affective cues to infer causal thoughts. Developmental Psychology, 18, 278–286. https://doi.org/10.1037//0012–1649.18.2.278.
Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01750.x.
Wong, P. T., & Weiner, B. (1981). When people ask “why” questions, and the heuristics of attributional search. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 650–663. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022–3514.40.4.650.
Zebrowitz, L. A. (2004). The origin of first impressions. Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology, 2, 93–108. https://doi.org/10.1556/JCEP.2.2004.1-2.6.
Zebrowitz, L. A., Fellous, J., Mignault, A., & Andreoletti, C. (2003). Trait impressions as overgeneralized responses to adaptively significant facial qualities: Evidence from connectionist modeling. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7, 194–215.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hareli, S., Hess, U. (2019). The Reverse Engineering of Emotions – Observers of Others’ Emotions as Naïve Personality Psychologists. In: Hess, U., Hareli, S. (eds) The Social Nature of Emotion Expression . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32968-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32968-6_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32967-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32968-6
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)