DO SMILES ELICIT MORE INFERENCES THAN DO FROWNS - THE EFFECT OF EMOTIONAL VALENCE ON THE PRODUCTION OF SPONTANEOUS INFERENCES

Previous work by Liu, Karasawa, and Weiner suggests that perceivers ma y draw more causal attributions for positive emotions than for negativ e emotions. If so, then perceivers may draw more inferences spontaneou sly for positive emotions than for negative emotions. Participants obs erved a short video of a target who displayed either happiness or sadn ess. In the first experiment, half of the participants who viewed each of these behaviors were instructed to diagnose the target's dispositi on and half were instructed to diagnose the target's situation. Result s revealed that although participants who viewed sadness drew only the inference consistent with their instructions, participants who viewed happiness drew both dispositional and situational inferences regardle ss of their instructions. In a second experiment, participants were in structed to diagnose the behavior of a target who displayed either hap piness or sadness. Results revealed that perceivers of happy behavior drew inferences spontaneously. Implications are discussed.