Reading the Room: Emotional Valence Appraisal in Adolescent and Adult Expressers

Whether someone is expressing a positive emotion (i.e. happiness) or a negative emotion (i.e. anger) can determine how we interact with them (McArthur and Baron, 1983). Hence, our perception of emotional valence (i.e., whether an emotion is pleasant or unpleasant; Barrett, 2006) can influence how we approach others. Research on the perception of emotion in others has focused on how we view children and adults’ emotional expressions, but not those of adolescents. We have an incomplete understanding of how emotion perception is affected by the expresser’s age. The current study assessed variations in perceivers’ ratings of emotional valence when viewing stimulus recordings of adolescent or adult expressers portraying different emotions. Using the lmerTest package in R Studio, linear mixed effects models were performed to investigate the effect of expresser age on raters’ perceptions of emotional valence in each recording. Models were built by adding fixed effects of stimulus age (adolescent or adult), emotion type (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, or neutral), and the interaction between stimulus age and emotion type in sequence. Significance was determined via likelihood ratio tests comparing each model to the previous one. There was a significant main effect of emotion type (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, or neutral) on emotional valence ratings. There was no main effect of stimulus age on emotional valence ratings; however, there was an interaction between emotion type and stimulus age. Compared to adolescents, adults were rated more negatively when expressing fear and sadness and more positively when expressing happiness. Results suggest that there are differences in how positively/negatively adult and adolescent expressers are perceived, depending on the type of emotion being expressed. This research can inform advertising: for instance, adults expressing happiness may be perceived more positively than adolescents, which could increase the likelihood that customers will purchase their products. References Barrett, L.F. (2006) Valence is a basic building block of emotional life. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 35-55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.006. McArthur, L. Z. & Baron, R. M. (1983). Toward an ecological theory of social perception. Psychological Review, 90(3), 215–238. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.90.3.215