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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.

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This paper presents a new approach to the demarcation of social emotions, based on their dependence on social appraisals that are designed to assess events bearing on social concerns. Previous theoretical attempts to characterize social emotions are compared, and their inconsistencies highlighted. Evidence for the present formulation is derived from theory and research into links between appraisals and emotions. Emotions identified as social using our criteria are also shown to bring more consistent consequences for social behavior than nonsocial emotions. We conclude by considering ways of validating and refining our classification.

Human interactions are replete with emotional exchanges. In these exchanges information about the emotional state of the interaction partners is only one type of information conveyed. In addition, emotion displays provide information about the interaction partners' disposition and the situation as such. That is, emotions serve as social signals. Acknowledging this role of emotions, this special section brings together research that illustrates how both person perception and situational understanding can be derived from emotional displays and the modulation of this process through context. Three contributions focus on information about expressers and their intentions. An additional article focuses on the informative value of emotional expressions for an observer's construal of social situations and another article exemplifies the way context determines the social impact of emotions. Finally, the last article presents the dynamic nature of mutual influence of emotions. In an attempt to integrate these contributions and offer lenses for future research, this editorial offers a contextualised model of social perception which attempts to systematise not only the types of information that emotion expressions can convey, but also to elaborate the notion of context.

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...

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Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7,007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = .49 [.43, .55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one's group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by countrylevel GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood.