Judgements of others’ emotional appropriateness are multidimensional

Abstract

This study investigated the multidimensional structure of judgements of emotional appropriateness, the degree to which an observer judges a target's emotion to conform to observer-valued expectations for emotion in that context. Participants (N=169) were shown one of two brief video clips of an actor either showing anger or neutral expressions in an anger-evoking situation of either low, medium, or high severity. Participants rated the target's emotion on the Perception of Emotion Appropriateness Rating Scale (PEARS), which taps observers’ perceptions of a target's emotional appropriateness for a specific situation. We found that appropriateness ratings are comprised of three factors, assessment of Type Present (type of emotion in expression); Type Absent (missing key emotions); and Intensity (intensity with which the emotion is felt or expressed). Results are discussed in terms of the usefulness of a multidimensional conceptualisation of emotional appropriateness.

Keywords:

• Emotional appropriateness
• Emotion perception
• Display rules

Acknowledgements

Portions of this article were presented in a poster at the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Palm Springs, California, 2006.

We thank Karen Gasper for her valuable comments on the manuscript. We also thank Agneta Fischer for providing us with the videotapes used in our study. We also thank the undergraduate research assistants involved in collecting data: Karen Berman, Stacey Cohen, Danielle Conrad, Lindsay Filoseta, Lindsey Mitchell, Christy Pfleger, Rachel Ravitch, Kelly Rega, Tarryn Stoken, and Joy Walters.

Notes

¹These video clips, obtained from Agneta Fischer, were originally developed and validated as stimulus materials for research on anger and neutral emotion expressions.

²We checked for sex differences via a 2 (Participant Sex: male or female)×2 (Speaker Emotion: anger or neutral)×3 (Situation Severity: low, medium, high)×3 (PEARS Subscale: Restraint, Kind, and Openness) mixed-factor ANOVA with repeated measures on the last factor. Only a main effect of Participant Sex occurred, F(1, 147) = 7.88, p=.005, =.05, such that females rated the speaker more positively than males did (M=4.64, SD=1.20 vs. M=4.36, SD=1.22). Because no other sex differences occurred, we omitted this variable from analyses.

³Because our focus is on PEARS subscale evaluations for each emotion and situation severity level, the summary is primarily concerned with the three-way interaction. However, other significant effects were obtained. Main effects of PEARS Subscales, F(2, 306) = 101.00, p<.001, =.40, and Speaker Emotion, F(2, 153) = 95.54, p<.001, =.38, were significant. Also, all two-way interactions were significant: PEARS×Speaker Emotion, F(2, 153) = 172.51, p<.001, =.53; PEARS×Situation Severity, F(4, 306) = 15.24, p<.001, =.16; and Situation Emotion×Situation Severity, F(2, 153) = 8.57, p<.001, =.10.