The influence of facial emotion displays, gender, and ethnicity on judgments of dominance and affiliation

ABSTRACT: Facial expressions of emotions convey not only information about emotional states but also about interpersonal intentions. The present study investi-gated 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 ex-pression—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 affil-iation. The results showed that the sex and the ethnicity of the encoder influenced observers ’ ratings of dominance and affiliation. For anger displays only, this influ-ence was mediated by expectations regarding how likely it is that a particular en-coder group would display anger. Further, affiliation ratings were equally influenced by low intensity and by high intensity expressions, whereas only fairly intense emo-tional expressions affected attributions of dominance. KEY WORDS: facial emotion displays; gender; ethnicity; dominance; affiliation. Emotional facial expressions and their meaning in interpersonal inter-actions have been of interest to psychologists since Darwin’s (1872) semi-nal work on the expression of emotion in man and animals. This line of research has mainly focussed on the question of whether emotion displays accurately communicate the internal states of individuals and which states observers tend to associate with which displays (see e.g., Ekman, 1982; Buck, 1984, but see also Russell, 1994, 1995). Yet, emotion displays con