The Impact of Context on the Perception of Emotions

Introduction Most human interactions are imbued with emotional exchange. In fact, it is hard to imagine a meaningful interaction in which emotion communication plays no role and even banal everyday transactions such as paying at a supermarket often involve an exchange of smiles or sometimes the expression of displeasure by one or both interaction partners. Importantly, these expressions serve as social signals that provide information about the expresser as well as about the situation (Hess, Kappas and Banse 1995) and that help to coordinate and facilitate interpersonal interaction and communication (Niedenthal and Brauer 2012; Parkinson, Fischer and Manstead 2005). This chapter explores the influence of context on the social signal value of such emotion expressions. What do they in fact tell us about the person or the situation and what influence has the context they occur in on the meaning of the exchange? When considering the impact of context, on the one hand, and the social signals inherent in emotion expressions, on the other, the first question to ask would be what emotions actually signal. The scientific study of emotion expressions is usually traced to Darwin's seminal work On the Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animal ([1872] 1965). Darwin understood emotion expressions as the visible part of an underlying emotional state, which are evolved and (at least at some point in the past) adaptive. The notion that the expressions communicate the organisms’ state and thereby allow a prediction of the organisms’ likely behaviour was a central point in this argument. Yet, Darwin's view has been disputed and rejected by those who considered facial expressions as exclusively or predominantly social or cultural signals, which are not linked to underlying states. Research by Ekman and colleagues (Ekman 1973; Ekman and Friesen 1971; Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth 1972; Ekman, Sorenson and Friesen 1969) as well as Izard (Izard 1971a, 1971b) initially vindicated Darwin's idea that at least some basic emotional expressions are universal and directly associated with an underlying emotional state (see Hwang and Matsumoto, this volume, for a defence of this view, and Jack and Russell, both this volume, for criticisms). To this day, this view has been repeatedly challenged by those who consider emotion expressions to be purely social signals or social constructions unconnected to an underlying state (Barrett 2013; Fridlund 1994).