Teacher's Emotional Display Affects Students' Perceptions of Teacher's Competence, Feelings, and Productivity in Online Small-Group Discussions

Teacher's emotions have been shown to be highly important in the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning. There is a recognized need to examine the essential role of teacher's emotions in students' academic achievement. However, the influence of teacher's displays of emotions on students' outcomes in small-group interaction activities, especially in the online environment, has received little attention in prior research. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between teacher's different emotional displays and students' perceptions of the teacher's competence, as well as students' collaborative feelings and productivity in online small-group discussions. Using a three-level between-subjects design, 74 participants were randomly divided into four-member groups comprising a teacher and three other participants. All the groups were asked to discuss an open-ended realistic problem using online software, during which the teacher's display of emotions varied (positive vs. negative vs. neutral). The participants' self-reported questionnaire data (perception of the teacher's competence, students' feeling of pleasure, collaborative satisfaction, and willingness to continue collaborating) and productivity (number of effective ideas expressed within a given time) were measured to compare the participants who were exposed to different emotional displays. As expected, the results showed that the participants who received the teacher's positive emotional display reported that they experienced higher levels of pleasure during the task. However, in contrast to our expectations, those under the negative emotional display condition showed a significantly higher level of productivity in the group task. In addition, compared to emotional display, the participants' perceptions of the teacher's competence were rated significantly higher under the neutral condition, and they reported higher levels of collaborative satisfaction and greater willingness to continue collaborating with their group. The findings have the potential benefit of informing educational practice on whether teachers should display their emotions in a small-group discussion or how they should display emotions following adjustment for the relative aim of the teaching activities.

Nonverbal Emotions While Disclosing Child Abuse: The Role of Interviewer Support

Statements by alleged victims are important when child abuse is prosecuted; triers-of-fact often attend to nonverbal emotional expressions when evaluating those statements. This study examined the associations among interviewer supportiveness, children’s nonverbal emotions, and informativeness during 100 forensic interviews with alleged victims of child abuse. Raters coded the silent videotapes for children’s nonverbal emotional expressions while other raters coded the transcripts for interviewer support, children’s verbal emotions, and informativeness. Results showed that children’s nonverbal signals were more common than and preceded the verbal signs. Interviewer support was associated with children’s expressivity. When children expressed more nonverbal emotions, they were more responsive during the pre-substantive phases and more informative about the abuse. Nonverbal emotions partially mediated the association between support and informativeness. The findings underline the value of nonverbal emotional expression during forensic interviews and demonstrate how the interviewers’ supportive demeanor can facilitate children’s emotional displays and increase informativeness.

Pulling on Heartstrings: Three Studies of the Effectiveness of Emotionally Framed Communication to Encourage Workplace Pro-Environmental Behavior

We investigated whether the emotional framing of climate change communication can influence workplace pro-environmental behavior. In three quasi-experimental studies, we examined whether emotional displays in climate change communication affected participants’ subsequent workplace pro-environmental behavior. In Studies 1 and 2, undergraduate and master’s students viewed a fictional news video about climate change, where the newsreader displayed one of five emotions: sadness, fear, anger, contentment, and hope. The dependent variable was recycling behavior following the viewing. In Study 3, office employees viewed the same news videos online; the dependent variable was requesting further information to increase pro-environmental behavior in the workplace. The results from all three studies show that displayed emotion significantly affected pro-environmental behavior and that sadness, in particular, resulted in significantly less workplace pro-environmental behavior. These results indicate the need to study the effect of discrete emotions, rather than assuming that emotions of the same valence have similar effects. The results also underscore the importance of using experimental designs in advancing the field. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for research, theory, and practice of emotionally framed communication of sustainability messages.

Influence of Emotions on the Effectiveness of the Creative Process

The relevance of this study is determined by the importance of issues of interrelation of the emotional component of activity with the final results obtained in the course of creative research in different areas, as well as the practical significance of studying the problems of the influence of a wide range of emotional experiences on the overall effectiveness of the creative process. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which the emotional component of creativity influences the effectiveness of the creative process, regardless of the field of activity. The leading approach in this study was a combination of theoretical study of various aspects of creative activity in general, with a structural analysis of the features of the influence of the emotional component on the overall effectiveness of the creative process in various areas of activity. The results obtained in the course of this study demonstrate the wide range of possibilities for the rational use of personal emotional displays on the specific issues of applying creative activity in general and in terms of assessing the effectiveness of the creative process in particular. The results and conclusions of this paper have significant practical value for representatives of creative professions, researchers of psycho-emotional manifestations of personality in the conduct of creative activity, and will be useful for the next generations of researchers of various aspects of the influence of emotional experiences on the effectiveness of the creative process. The results will be useful as a scientific basis for the author to conduct further full-fledged research into the wide range of issues presented in this paper, thereby contributing to further objective and qualitative coverage of the subject matter

The Politics of Emotions in International Relations: Who Gets to Feel What, Whose Emotions Matter, and the “History Problem” in Sino-Japanese Relations

A large literature within the field of international relations has now explored both how emotions can shape political perceptions and behavior and how international actors may seek to manipulate, harness, or deploy emotions and emotional displays for political ends. Less attention, however, has been paid to how political struggles can also center upon issues of who can or should feel what emotion and whose feelings matter. Precisely, we theorize a distributive politics of emotion that can manifest in three general forms, all of which have their own properties and logics of contestation. The first centers on emotional obligations, understood as an actor's duties to feel and express specific emotions. The second concerns emotional entitlements, or the rights an actor enjoys to either feel or not feel certain emotions. And the third involves hierarchies of emotional deference, that is, the varying degrees of priority accorded to different actors’ feelings. We illustrate how the politics of emotions can unfold on the international stage by looking at developments in the so-called history problem within Sino-Japanese relations.

Gender, Candidate Emotional Expression, and Voter Reactions During Televised Debates

Voters evaluate politicians not just by what they say, but also how they say it, via facial displays of emotions and vocal pitch. Candidate characteristics can shape how leaders use—and how voters react to—nonverbal cues. Drawing on role congruity expectations, we study how the use of and reactions to facial, vocal, and textual communication in political debates varies by candidate gender. Relying on full-length videos of four German federal election debates (2005–2017) and a minor party debate, we use video, audio, and text data to measure candidate facial displays of emotion, vocal pitch, and speech sentiment. Consistent with our expectations, Angela Merkel expresses less anger than her male opponents, but she is just as emotive in other respects. Combining these measures of emotional expression with continuous responses recorded by live audiences, we find that voters punish Merkel for anger displays and reward her happiness and general emotional displays.

EXPRESS: A New Livestream Retail Analytics Framework to Assess the Sales Impact of Emotional Displays

At the intersection of technology and marketing, the authors develop a framework to unobtrusively detect salespersons’ faces and simultaneously extract six emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust. They analyze 99,451 sales pitches on a livestream retailing platform and match them with actual sales transactions. Results reveal that each emotional display, including happiness, uniformly exhibits a negative U-shaped effect on sales over time. The maximum sales resistance appears in the middle rather than at the beginning or the end of sales pitches. Taken together, in one-to-many screen-mediated communications, salespersons should sell with a straight face. In addition, the authors derive closed-form formulae for the optimal allocation of the presence of a face and emotional displays over the presentation span. In contrast to the U-shaped effects, the optimal face presence wanes at the start, gradually builds to a crescendo, and eventually ebbs. Finally, they show how to objectively rank salespeople and circumvent biases in performance appraisals, thereby making novel contributions to people analytics. This research integrates new types of data and methods, key theoretical insights, and important managerial implications to inform the expanding opportunity that livestreaming presents to marketers to create, communicate, deliver, and capture value.

Harnessing Anger and Shame: Emotional Diplomacy in Early Modern Context

Emotions were, in early modern literature on diplomacy, described as a parasitic and even dangerous manifestation, and this view has endured until today. A series of recent books and articles published in the field of the history of emotions lays however the groundwork to question this traditional analysis. This article thus aims to examine the possibility of a broader and more strategic use of emotions in early modern diplomacy than is often acknowledged, and therefore the possibility of what can be called an early modern emotional diplomacy. I will first provide a summary of what the honnête homme culture of Europe’s ruling class meant for an ambassador in terms of emotion control. I will then show, through a few examples from diplomatic occurrences during Charles ii of England’s late reign, some of the possible uses of emotion in early modern diplomacy. Thirdly, I will study through one very memorable display of emotion from the English king the way such a display could be prepared and staged in order to achieve full effectiveness. Lastly, I will put these one-time emotional displays in the perspective of Charles ii’s international policy, arguing that they were not conceived as isolated occurrences but as parts of a real diplomatic strategy in which emotion played a crucial role, in other words an emotional diplomacy.

Facial Mimicry and Social Context Affect Smile Interpretation

Theoretical accounts and empirical research suggest that people use various sources of information, including sensorimotor simulation and social context, while judging emotional displays. However, the evidence on how those factors can interplay is limited. The present research tested whether social context information has a greater impact on perceivers’ smile judgments when mimicry is experimentally restricted. In Study 1, participants watched images of affiliative smiles presented with verbal descriptions of situations associated with happiness or politeness. Half the participants could freely move their faces while rating the extent to which the smiles communicated affiliation, whereas for the other half mimicry was restricted via a pen-in-mouth procedure. As predicted, smiles were perceived as more affiliative when the social context was polite than when it was happy. Importantly, the effect of context information was significantly larger among participants who could not freely mimic the facial expressions. Study 2 replicated these findings, thereby controlling for empathy and mood, and showed that social context also influences smile discrimination. Together, the findings extend the evidence on the role of verbal information in the interpretation of facial expressions and suggest that mimicry importantly modulates the impact of social context information on smile perception.

Release or Denial: Evaluating the Roles of Emotion and Risk in Parole Decisions

Parole boards often incorporate numerous factors when making release decisions. These factors are typically related to the inmates’ case files. However, in some instances, parole boards’ decisions are influenced by factors outside of the case files, sometimes referred to as extra-legal factors. According to the emotion as social information model, emotion can communicate specific messages to others, and in this case, parole board members might unknowingly incorporate their own emotions and inmates’ emotional displays into their decisions. The current study examines the role of parole board member and inmate emotional expressions as predictors of parole release decisions. Parole hearings were coded for emotion, parole board and inmate gender, supporter presence, and risk scores. Overall, risk scores and parole board members’ emotions predicted release decisions. Higher risk scores were associated with a lower likelihood of release, and inmates’ negative emotion was related to a lower likelihood of release. Implications are discussed.