Abstract
One’s emotional expressions can influence another’s cognition, attitude, and behaviour during social interactions. Yet, how one’s emotional expressions affect social interactions in a motor context has not been explored. Experiments 1 and 2 examined how facial and bodily emotions, respectively, shape one’s willingness to engage in an object handover task. Each trial started with a prompt indicating the action (give, take) and the object (knife, spoon). This was followed by a brief clip of a point-light display expressing either a facial or a bodily emotion (angry, sad, happy, neutral). Given the prompt, participants rated their willingness to engage with that person on a 7-point Likert scale. Repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant three-way interaction of Emotion x Action x Object on willingness ratings for facial emotions only [F(2.521, 83.179)=4.359, p<.001]. Simple main effects revealed that willingness ratings were significantly lower when giving than taking a knife when the facial emotions were angry (M=2.412, 4.103) and sad (M=2.691, 4.206). In contrast, willingness ratings were significantly lower when taking than giving a spoon for happy (M=4.397, 6.147) and neutral (M=4.191, 5.412) facial emotions. These results suggest that negative emotions (angry, sad) adversely impact one’s willingness to give someone a dangerous object, unlike positive (happy) and neutral emotions, which are perceived as less threatening. The absence of a three-way interaction for bodily emotions (p=.077) may be attributed to the task's lack of whole-body movements. Our findings show how emotional expressions shape one’s willingness to engage in a motor task.
