The influence of facial emotion displays, gender, and ethnicity on judgments of dominance and affiliation

Facial expressions of emotions convey not only information about emotional states but also about interpersonal intentions. The present study investiga ted whether factors known to influence the decoding of emotional expression s-the gender and ethnicity of the stimulus person as well as the intensity of the expression-would also influence attributions of interpersonal intent ions. For this, 145 men and women rated emotional facial expressions posed by both Caucasian and Japanese male and female stimulus persons on perceive d dominance and affiliation. The results showed that the sex and the ethnic ity of the encoder influenced observers' ratings of dominance and affiliati on. For anger displays only, this influence was mediated by expectations re garding how likely it is that a particular encoder group would display ange r. Further, affiliation ratings were equally influenced by low intensity an d by high intensity expressions, whereas only fairly intense emotional expr essions affected attributions of dominance.