Are you joking? The moderating role of smiles in the perception of verbal statements

Abstract

We investigated the effects of smiling on perceptions of positive, neutral and negative verbal statements. Participants viewed computer-generated movies of female characters who made angry, disgusted, happy or neutral statements and then showed either one of two temporal forms of smile (slow vs. fast onset) or a neutral expression. Smiles significantly increased the perceived positivity of the message by making negative statements appear less negative and neutral statements appear more positive. However, these smiles led the character to be seen as less genuine than when she showed a neutral expression. Disgust + smile messages led to higher judged happiness than did anger + smile messages, suggesting that smiles were seen as reflecting humour when combined with disgust statements, but as masking negative affect when combined with anger statements. These findings provide insights into the ways that smiles moderate the impact of verbal statements.

Keywords:

• Emotions
• Facial expressions
• Verbal messages
• Channel inconsistency
• Smiling

Notes

¹To examine the possibility that disgust statements differed from anger statements with respect to ratings of the two relevant emotions (disgust and anger, respectively), paired t-tests were conducted. These showed that, in the context of a neutral expression, disgust statements led to levels of perceived disgust that were as intense as the levels of perceived anger generated by anger statements, t(71) = 1.62, p>.05, indicating that anger and disgust statements were comparable in intensity. However, in the context of a smile, disgust statements gave rise to significantly lower disgust ratings than the anger ratings that were generated by anger statements, t(71) = 3.09, p=.003. This was especially the case for smiles with a long onset, t(71) = 3.31, p=.001; short onset smiles did not give rise to intensity differences between the two types of negative statement, t(71) = 1.32, p>.05.