Emotional versus neutral expressions and perceptions of social dominance and submissiveness.

Abstract

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...

A review on sex differences in processing emotional signals

“…On the opposite side, anger and aggression are seen as socially acceptable for men and aggressive boys have been found to be judged as more likable and socially competent than nonaggressive boys (Hart, DeWolf, & Burts, 1992;Serbin, Marchessault, McAffer, Peters, & Schwartzman, 1993), whereas this is not the case for girls (Crick, 1997). Men who expressed neutral and angry emotions were rated as higher in dominance when compared with men expressing sadness or shame (Hareli, Shomrat, & Hess, 2009). Female smiles are appealing to males, increasing physical attractiveness and enhancing sex appeal.…”

The observer observed: Frontal EEG asymmetry and autonomic responses differentiate between another person's direct and averted gaze when the face is seen live

“…Interestingly, although sadness can be regarded as a negative emotion, it has been shown to activate automatic approach motivation (Seidel et al, 2010). The gender role expectations might also have interacted with the impressions given by the stimulus faces: for instance, neutral expressions have been inferred to reflect dominance in men but not in women (Hareli et al, 2009).…”

Transforming the mirror: Power fundamentally changes facial responding to emotional expressions.

“…Regarding perception, for example, negative emotions (especially anger) of high-status targets are highly salient, presumably because of the association between anger and dominance (Hareli, Shomrat, & Hess, 2009;Tiedens, 2001). Regarding responding, for example, smiling is preferably used to regulate status in social relationships, perhaps due to greater flexibility and control of that expression (Keltner et al, 1998;Niedenthal et al, 2010).…”