Fast and involuntary reactions to the social message signaled by emotional faces. The role of moderating variables

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Wentura
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2014 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265677242

This project aims to test which process drives fast and involuntary reactions to emotional facial expressions. A prevailing hypothesis is that positive expressions automatically always elicit a positive evaluative response (e.g., approach) whereas negative expressions automatically always elicit a negative evaluative response (e.g., avoidance). In contrast, we hypothesized that responses can also be triggered by the social message signaled by an emotional expression. For example, the happy expression shown by a member of an in-group might immediately be seen as expressing a friendly wish for affiliation and elicit a positive reaction, whereas the same expression might be immediately taken as a sign of arrogance or Schadenfreude if shown by a member of a negatively evaluated out-group and elicit a negative reaction. We found evidence for this social message hypothesis with different dependent variables in the first funding period: In the approach/avoidance paradigm, fear and happiness expressed by in-group members elicited concordant behavior (i.e, happy-approach and fear-avoidance produced faster responses than the reversed assignment), whereas emotions expressed by out-group members elicited a reversed pattern. We found the same pattern with the startle reflex paradigm and we showed that reactions to expressions of anger are influenced by the physical strength of the opponent. However, our findings also showed boundary conditions of the social message hypothesis: We found that the contrast emotion employed in the approach/avoidance task influences which process drives the reactions such that the same expression (i.e., anger) produced an avoidance reaction if paired with happiness but an approach reaction if paired with fear. We interpreted this pattern as valence-based responses versus social message-based responses. We also found unexpected limitations: The emotion x group interaction was not found in the evaluative priming task. Thus, on the basis of the first funding phase, we can conclude that fast and unintentional reactions to emotional expressions are influenced by their respective social message only under specific conditions. Thus, it is important to examine the circumstances under which reactions are triggered by which aspect. This is the goal of the second funding period. We thereby hypothesize that it is the default to react to the (nominal) valence of an emotional expression since this is the most salient feature. However, in situations in which the social message is especially relevant for the perceiver, it is more adaptive to react to the social message of the expression. We propose that relevance of the social message signaled by the emotional expression is established if two prerequisites are fulfilled: the emotion expression is task-relevant for the perceiver (“task-relevance”) and context cues which point to the informative value of the social message signaled by the expression for the perceiver are present (“context cues”).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants