THE REPRESENTATION OF EMOTIONS IN GROUPS - THE RELATIVE IMPACT OF SOCIAL NORMS, POSITIVE-NEGATIVE ASYMMETRY AND FAMILIARITY ON THE PERCEPTION OF EMOTIONS

Research in several countries shows that people hold norms of emotion perception, so that socially desirable emotions are perceived as posit ive and moderate. Subjects also believe that positive and moderate emo tions are dominant in their lives. Other research shows that increased familiarity with a social group allows a better differentiation among the members and the attributes of this group (e.g. wider variability of emotions). In the present study, we compare the relative impact of familiarity with pleasant and unpleasant groups and social norms on em otion perception. Subjects (N = 150) were to rate imagined family grou ps, families that they did not know well, and families that they knew very well, on perceived differentiation and variability of emotional e pisodes, extremity of emotional events, and global family evaluations. Results indicated that familiarity is weakly associated with perceive d emotional variability in target families, and that, regardless of th eir familiarity with the family, subjects viewed unpleasant families a s more negative, as less familiar, and as having a larger range of emo tions than pleasant families. Results are discussed in terms of the id ea that perception of emotions in groups depends more strongly on soci al norms than either on positive-negative asymmetry or on direct exper ience with their members.