“Tears of joy” & “smiles of joy” prompt distinct patterns of interpersonal emotion regulation

ABSTRACT

Close relationship partners often respond to happiness expressed through smiles with capitalization, i.e. they join in attempting to up-regulate and prolong the individual’s positive emotion, and they often respond to crying with interpersonal down-regulation of negative emotions, attempting to dampen the negative emotions. We investigated how people responded when happiness was expressed through tears, an expression termed dimorphous. We hypothesised that the physical expression of crying would prompt interpersonal down-regulation of emotion when the onlooker perceived that the expresser was experiencing negative or positive emotions. When participants were asked how they would behave when faced with smiles of joy, we expected capitalization responses, and when faced with tears of joy, we expected down-regulation responses. In six experimental studies using video and photographic stimuli, we found support for our hypotheses. Throughout our investigations we test and discuss boundaries of and possible mechanisms for such responsiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• emotion expression
• emotion perception
• interpersonal emotion regulation
• dimorphous expressions

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Chandler Gregoire for her helpful assistance in creating the video stimuli used in Study 1 and Study 2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Oriana R. Aragón http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1016-2076

Notes

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1360253.

1 Detailed results for all studies are reported in Tables A1–A4.

2 Dimorphous expressions of negative emotion appear to exist (e.g. smiles when sad). However, we did not investigate smiles expressed upon losing in this work, because such displays in these particular contexts could represent motivations or emotions that are outside the scope of this investigation (e.g. self-presentation concerns).