Reading people's minds from emotion expressions in interdependent decision making.

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Understanding how individuals infer mental states from emotional displays is crucial for social interaction.
• Interdependent decision-making relies on accurately predicting others' intentions based on their expressed emotions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether people use appraisal principles when interpreting emotion displays in social contexts.
• To determine if beliefs about others' appraisals mediate the link between emotion expressions and inferred intentions.

Main Methods:

• Five experiments were conducted, employing contextual manipulation, textual appraisal expressions, multiple mediation analyses, and causal-chain designs.
• Participants' responses to emotion displays were analyzed under varying competitive and cooperative conditions.
• The impact of facial emotion displays was compared to textual expressions of appraisals.

Main Results:

• Emotion displays yield context-dependent interpretations; a smile can elicit negative responses in competitive contexts.
• Appraisals, such as goal conduciveness and blame attribution, are the core information derived from emotion displays.
• Beliefs about others' appraisals significantly mediate the influence of emotion expressions on expectations of intentions.

Conclusions:

• A model is proposed where emotion expressions trigger inferences about others' appraisals, leading to mental state attributions.
• This mechanism is vital for understanding social decision-making and has implications for human-agent interaction design.
• The findings highlight the importance of appraisal theory in explaining how emotional cues are processed in social cognition.