Mood effects on emotion recognition

Mood affects memory and social judgments. However, findings are inconsistent with regard to how mood affects emotion recognition: For sad moods, general performance decrements in emotion recognition have been reported, as well as an emotion specific bias, such as better recognition of sad facial expressions compared to happy expressions (negative bias). Far less research has been conducted on the influence of happy moods on emotion recognition. We primed 93 participants with happy, sad, or neutral moods and had them perform an emotion recognition task. Results showed a negative bias for participants in sad moods and a positive bias for participants in happy moods. Sad and happy moods hampered the recognition of mood-incongruent expressions; the recognition of mood-congruent expressions was not affected by mood

Gender Effects in Information Processing on a Nonverbal Decoding Task

Women typically outperform men on the ability to assess other people's nonverbal behavior. This difference might occur because women are taught to be more sensitive to emotional and nonverbal cues at a very early age compared to men. As a consequence, women might use a more favorable cognitive processing style than men during nonverbal decoding. The present study investigated whether this gender difference is due to the use of different cognitive information processing styles (global or local). Participants (N = 137) were Swiss undergraduate students that were randomly assigned to either a global (focusing on the whole) or a local (focusing on details) priming of information processing style, or to a control group. They then performed a nonverbal decoding task. Results showed that compared to the control group, local priming had beneficial and global priming detrimental effects for nonverbal decoding accuracy. This was due to an improved performance in men after the local priming; women's performance was not significantly affected by the local priming. Global priming increased nonverbal decoding accuracy in men and decreased performance in women. We conclude that women already use the more beneficial local processing style by default and that men's performance can be boosted when providing them a processing strateg

Caring and Dominance Affect Participants' Perceptions and Behaviors During a Virtual Medical Visit

BACKGROUND: Physician communication style affects patients' perceptions and behaviors. Two aspects of physician communication style, caring and dominance, are often related in that a high caring physician is usually not dominant and vice versa. OBJECTIVE: This research was aimed at testing the sole or joint impact of physician caring and physician dominance on participant perceptions and behavior during the medical visit. PARTICIPANTS AND DESIGN: In an experimental design, analog patients (APs) (167 university students) interacted with a computer-generated virtual physician on a computer screen. Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 experimental conditions (physician communication style: high dominance and low caring, high dominance and high caring, low dominance and low caring, or low dominance and high caring). The APs' verbal and nonverbal behavior during the visit as well as their perception of the virtual physician were assessed. RESULTS: Analog patients were able to distinguish dominance and caring dimensions of the virtual physician's communication. Moreover, APs provided less medical information, spoke less, and agreed more when interacting with a high-dominant compared to a low-dominant physician. They also talked more about emotions and were quicker in taking their turn to speak when interacting with a high-caring compared to a low-caring physician. CONCLUSIONS: Dominant and caring physicians elicit different emotional and behavioral responses from APs. Physician dominance reduces patient engagement in the medical dialog and produces submissiveness, whereas physician caring increases patient emotionalit

Power at work: Linking objective power to psychological power

Experimental research conducted with student participants has documented that feeling powerful or powerless (psychological power) affects outcomes with high practical relevance for organizations. However, it is unclear how results from these studies can be generalized to organizational settings in which individuals have various roles that imply more or less objective power. To address this gap, we present a theoretical framework to aid in the understanding of how objective power in organizations affects psychological power. We assume that stable differences in organizational rank (i.e., structural power) determine the likelihood of interactions with superiors, subordinates, or peers. These interactions give rise to within-person variation in situational power which should lead to dynamic fluctuations of psychological power and eventually its outcomes. Results of a preregistered experiment (n = 190 participants) and a preregistered experience sampling study (n = 129 participants) conducted with working adults support our key predictions: Structural power was associated with the likelihood of being in a high power versus low power situation. Within-person differences in situational power were related to feelings of power such as judgments about (1) one's own ability to influence others in a given social situation (i.e., interpersonal power) and (2) one's own competence, agency, autonomy, and independence (i.e., personal power)

Gender Biases in (Inter) Action: The Role of Interviewers’ and Applicants’ Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes in Predicting Women’s Job Interview Outcomes

Although explicit stereotypes of women in the workplace have become increasingly positive, negative stereotypes persist at an implicit level, with women being more likely associated with incompetent-and men with competent-managerial traits. Drawing upon work on self-fulfilling prophecies and interracial interactions, we investigated whether and how implicit and explicit gender stereotypes held by both male interviewers and female applicants predicted women's interview outcomes. Thirty male interviewers conducted mock job interviews with 30 female applicants. Before the interview, we measured interviewers' and applicants' implicit and explicit gender stereotypes. The interviewers' and applicants' implicit stereotypes independently predicted external evaluations of the performance of female applicants. Whereas female applicants' higher implicit stereotypes directly predicted lower performance, male interviewers' implicit stereotypes indirectly impaired female applicants' performance through lower evaluations by the interviewer and lower self-evaluations by the applicant. Moreover, having an interviewer who was at the same time high in implicit and low in explicit stereotypes predicted the lowest performance of female applicants. Our findings highlight the importance of taking into account both implicit and explicit gender stereotypes in mixed-gender interactions and point to ways to reduce the negative effects of gender stereotypes in job interviews. Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ's website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental

Nonverbal Social Sensing: What Social Sensing Can and Cannot Do for the Study of Nonverbal Behavior From Video

The study of nonverbal behavior (NVB), and in particular kinesics (i.e., face and body motions), is typically seen as cost-intensive. However, the development of new technologies (e.g., ubiquitous sensing, computer vision, and algorithms) and approaches to study social behavior [i.e., social signal processing (SSP)] makes it possible to train algorithms to automatically code NVB, from action/motion units to inferences. Nonverbal social sensing refers to the use of these technologies and approaches for the study of kinesics based on video recordings. Nonverbal social sensing appears as an inspiring and encouraging approach to study NVB at reduced costs, making it a more attractive research field. However, does this promise hold? After presenting what nonverbal social sensing is and can do, we discussed the key challenges that researchers face when using nonverbal social sensing on video data. Although nonverbal social sensing is a promising tool, researchers need to be aware of the fact that algorithms might be as biased as humans when extracting NVB or that the automated NVB coding might remain context-dependent. We provided study examples to discuss these challenges and point to potential solutions

Emergent leaders through looking and speaking: from audio-visual data to multimodal recognition

In this paper we present a multimodal analysis of emergent leadership in small groups using audio-visual features and discuss our experience in designing and collecting a data corpus for this purpose. The ELEA Audio-Visual Synchronized corpus (ELEA AVS) was collected using a light portable setup and contains recordings of small group meetings. The participants in each group performed the winter survival task and filled in questionnaires related to personality and several social concepts such as leadership and dominance. In addition, the corpus includes annotations on participants' performance in the survival task, and also annotations of social concepts from external viewers. Based on this corpus, we present the feasibility of predicting the emergent leader in small groups using automatically extracted audio and visual features, based on speaking turns and visual attention, and we focus specifically on multimodal features that make use of the looking at participants while speaking and looking at while not speaking measures. Our findings indicate that emergent leadership is related, but not equivalent, to dominance, and while multimodal features bring a moderate degree of effectiveness in inferring the leader, much simpler features extracted from the audio channel are found to give better performanc