An interpersonal Communication Aspect: The power of Moods in Interpreting Nonverbal Messages.

The social perception and cognitive functions are two key factors in determining social behavior by evaluating social cues and the emotional responses of others. Emotions play a fundamental role in human cognition and researches on emotional communication mainly focus on facial expressions. Previous researches show agreement on a universal set of emotions which are associated with specific facial displays. Present research is conducted in line with discrete emotion theory postulating that “affect programs for basic emotions produce prototypical response configurations that include emotion-specific patterns of facial expressions” (Scherer, Ellgring, 2007:113) in order to interpret the interpersonal communication process which is the issue in every part of life especially in professional stage. The current study aims to examine the effect of moods on the perception of facial images in the scope of the Affect Program Theory of Facial Displays (APT) proposed by Ekman (1997). The process is interpreted from the categorical perspective of the perception of facial images. In order to determine the short-term mood of the participants, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) is administered and the facial expression images from the Pictures of Facial Affect (PFA) database (Ekman and Friesen, 2003) are used to measure the perception of facial images. The studied population of this preliminary study included 112 social sciences students. The results revealed a rather small negative effect of negative affectivity on affect perception throughtout facial picture