Emotion perception & decision-making

 

 

How other people's emotional states could help us in decision making?

Do situations involving social threat lead to bias in perception and decoding of emotions?

Does social anxiety impair decision-making?

How social factors impact the categorization and memory of facial expressions?

 

 

A frequent source of information for decision making is other people's emotional states.
These states inform us of:

  • how others evaluate the situation (or a specific object in that situation)
  • what are their behavioral intentions in the context (Frijda, 1986)
  • how others are likely to react to our own behaviors and decisions
  • whether others will support or oppose our behavioral decisions (Riggio, 2005).
  • For example, someone in a difficult negotiation will observe the emotional reaction of the other party in order to decide which negotiation path to follow.

 

Decoding other people's emotions is a key component of many decision processes and is likely to be even more important in situations involving social threat. Many studies suggest that specific biases in the decoding of emotion occurs under social threat. Biases pertaining to the perception of facial expression of emotion received particular attention (e.g. Mogg & Bradley, 2002).

Social threat has been studied:

  • from a clinical perspective, in terms of social anxiety (Philippot & Douilliez, 2005), or
  • from a social perspective, in the larger context of in- versus out-group interactions (Philippot & Yabar, 2005).

 

However, the impact of these biases on decision making, and behavioral orientation has not yet been the focus of systematic investigations. The present programs of research are developed in order to fill this gap.

Program II.1 will adopt a clinical perspective and consider the role of individual differences in terms of sensitivity to social anxiety.

Program II.2 will embrace a social cognition perspective and consider how social factors (group membership, power, status) impact the categorization and memory of facial expressions.

 

Promoters associated to these programs are

| contact : Anne-Catherine Defeldre | 4/01/2010 |