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Chapter 6 - Socio-affective inferential mechanisms involved in emotion recognition

from Part III - On the mechanics of affective social learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2019

By
Christian Mumenthaler  and
David Sander
Edited by
Daniel Dukes  and
Fabrice Clément
Daniel Dukes
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
Fabrice Clément
Affiliation:
Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
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Summary

Among social stimuli, the human face is unique. Its properties and features, both static and dynamic, reveal different aspects of a person. Perceivers use this information when they aim, for example, to recognize individuals, identify their social groups, discern their personality, detect their focus of attention, understand their verbal and non-verbal behaviours, and infer their emotions. Emotions that we read from facial actions are crucial to social interaction: They provide information that helps us understand social intentions, how to react to others, and to evaluate the affective meaning of many events that we encounter in our environment. In this chapter, we focus on social appraisal – one of the central mechanisms involved in affective social learning. In particular, we discuss the notion that, through a particular socio-affective inferential mechanism, social appraisal plays a significant role when the emotional expression of person A is used to learn about the value of the emotion expressed by person B. The first section of this chapter provides a brief historical introduction to the relation between contextual information and emotion recognition in faces. Then, we focus on the construct of social appraisal and its manifestation in socio-affective inferential mechanisms involved in emotion recognition. In the third section, we present empirical evidence supporting the automaticity of such socio-affective inferential mechanisms and discuss its implication for the theoretical framework of affective social learning. Next, we discuss the idea that ambiguous situations may be particularly prone to social appraisal taking place. Finally, we discuss how social appraisal, underpinned by a socio-affective inferential mechanism, may be integrated into the affective social learning framework.

Keywords

Affective social learningemotion recognitionsocial contextsocial inferencesocial appraisalautomaticityambiguity hypothesis
Type
Chapter
Information
Foundations of Affective Social Learning
Conceptualizing the Social Transmission of Value
 , pp. 142 - 164
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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