Body Language     Linguaggio del Corpo     Langage du Corps

Journal of nonverbal Behavior
, 24 (4): 265-283, Winter 2000

The Influence of Facial Emotion Displays, Gender, and Ethnicity on Judgments of Dominance and Affiliation*

Ursula Hess, Department of Psychology, University of Quebec at Montreal, CP 8888, Station A, Montréal, QC H3C 3P8, Canada
Sylvie Blairy, Free University of Brussels, ERASME Hospital, Belgium
Robert E. Kleck , Department of Psychology, Dartmouth College

Facial expressions of emotions convey not only information about emotional states but also about interpersonal intentions. The present study investigated whether factors known to influence the decoding of emotional expressions—the gender and ethnicity of the stimulus person as well as the intensity of the expression—would also influence attributions of interpersonal intentions. For this, 145 men and women rated emotional facial expressions posed by both Caucasian and Japanese male and female stimulus persons on perceived dominance and affiliation. The results showed that the sex and the ethnicity of the encoder influenced observers' ratings of dominance and affiliation. For anger displays only, this influence was mediated by expectations regarding how likely it is that a particular encoder group would display anger. Further, affiliation ratings were equally influenced by low intensity and by high intensity expressions, whereas only fairly intense emotional expressions affected attributions of dominance.

Keywords
facial emotion displays, gender, ethnicity, dominance, affiliation

Article ID:
228277
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* Reproduced with permission of Copyright Service of Kluwer Academic Publishers.