Posted February 2, Reviewed by Kaja Perina. How do you know what emotion someone is expressing? A common method used by psychology researchers is to examine facial expressionsβoften expressions preselected to try to convey a specific emotion.
But the real world is messy. What do we do when interpreting conflicting or ambiguous cues to emotion? New research by Ensberg-Diamant and colleagues in the J ournal of Experimental Psychology: General finds that how you interpret cues depends on who you are.
Some people tend to rely consistently on facial expressions, while others rely more on contextual cues. You can think of this like a personality trait or a stable style of thinking about the world.
Across six studies, the researchers found that this tendency was stable over time. If you relied on faces more one day, you were more likely to rely on them more another day, too.
Study 1: Is your emotion interpretation style consistent? In this study, people were given facial expressions paired with body postures. They were asked to identify what emotion the face was expressing, but they had conflicting information from the pose. What did they do? Some of the people consistently ignored the pose and just reported on the faceβbut others tended to change their interpretation of the face based on the body pose.
