Emotional expressions influence social judgments of personality traits. The goal of the present research was to show that it is of interest to assess the impact of neutral expressions in this context. In 2 studies using different methodologies, the authors found that participants perceived men who expressed neutral and angry emotions as higher in dominance when compared with men expressing sadness or shame. Study 1 showed that this is also true for men expressing happiness. In contrast, women expressing either anger or happiness were perceived as higher in dominance than were women showing a neutral expression who were rated as less dominant. However, sadness expressions by both men and women clearly decreased the extent to which they were perceived as dominant, and a trend in this direction emerged for shame expressions by men in Study 2. Thus, neutral expressions seem to be perceived as a sign of dominance in men but not in women. The present findings extend our understanding of the way different emotional expressions affect perceived dominance and the signal function of neutral expressions-which in the past have often been ignored.Keywords: social perception of emotions, emotional expression, social dominance, social submissiveness Showing certain emotion expressions leads others to attribute specific traits to the individuals who express these emotions and, conversely, knowledge that a person has certain traits leads people to expect certain emotional reactions from them. One important set of traits in this context is related to social power.Social power refers to the ability of an individual to provide or withhold valued resources or administer punishment (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002). Two important correlates of social power that have been found to be associated with specific facial expressions are status (Tiedens, Ellsworth, & Mesquita, 2000), which describes the power associated with the individual's role, and dominance (Hess, Adams, & Kleck, 2005), which describes how assertive, forceful, and/or self-assured an individual is-these factors in turn impinge on a person's potential power (for a fuller discussion, see Anderson & Berdahl, 2002;Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003).In this context, Tiedens et al. (2000) found that participants believed that a high-status person would feel more anger when failing and more pride when succeeding compared with a person of lower status who is expected to feel more sadness/guilt versus appreciation in the respective situations. Conversely, observers perceive anger as a more appropriate reaction for a dominant person than for a submissive one .Overall, these findings are consistent with the notion put forward by Keltner et al. (2003), that high levels of power are associated with the approach system, and the cognitions, emotions, and behaviors that are related to approach, whereas lower levels of power are related to the inhibition system and the cognitions, emotions, and behaviors it connects to. Accordingly, emotions such as guilt, sadness, shame, embarrassment, and s...

Purpose -The paper aims to study how shame, guilt and fear experienced by failing employees determine their explanation of the failure. Design/methodology/approach -Employees participated in two studies, one assessing actual personal examples of failures and another used imaginary vignettes. To manipulate the extent to which guilt or shame was the dominant emotion experienced by the failing employee, participants were asked to generate counterfactual thoughts typical of each of these feelings. Fear was manipulated by describing a threatening atmosphere in the organization. Measured was the likelihood that the employee took responsibility for what happened and provided a valid explanation. Likelihood of explaining the event by using excuses, justifications, concessions or denials was also measured. Findings -Findings indicate guilt was associated with explanations that help the organization learn from the failure and assist employees in restoring their relationships with the organization and co-workers. Heightened levels of fear, however, decreased this desirable effect of guilt. Shame had no unique contribution to an employee's choice of explanations.Research limitations/implications -The use of self-reports and vignettes limits the ecological validity of the present findings. Nevertheless, it provides preliminary evidence for the importance of the factors under study. Practical implications -These findings contribute to an understanding of the ways organizations can provide emotional settings conductive to constructive failure inquiries both for organizations and employees. Originality/value -The role emotions play in explanation of failures is an understudied issue both in social psychology and organizational research. The present study opens an avenue for more studies in this direction.