Reading emotions, reading people: Emotion perception and inferences drawn from perceived emotions

• Published in: Current opinion in psychology 2022-02, Vol.43, p.85-90
• Main Authors: Lange, Jens, Heerdink, Marc W., van Kleef, Gerben A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Context; Emotion expression; Emotion perception; Inference
• ISSN: 2352-250X; 2352-250X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.008

Emotional expressions play an important role in coordinating social interaction. We review research on two critical processes that underlie such coordination: (1) perceiving emotions from emotion expressions and (2) drawing inferences from perceived emotions. Broad evidence indicates that (a) observers can accurately perceive emotions from a person's facial, bodily, vocal, verbal, and symbolic expressions and that such emotion perception is further informed by contextual information. Moreover, (b) observers draw consequential and contextualized inferences from these perceived emotions about the expresser, the situation, and the self. Thus, emotion expressions enable coordinated action by providing information that facilitates adaptive behavioral responses. We recommend that future studies investigate how people integrate information from different expressive modalities and how this affects consequential inferences. [Display omitted] •Emotional expressions facilitate social coordination via perception and inferences.•Observers accurately perceive emotions from a person's contextualized expressions.•These expressions can be facial, bodily, verbal, vocal, or symbolic.•Observers draw consequential and contextualized inferences from perceived emotions.