title: Susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions improves detection of smile authenticity.
abstract: A smile is a context-dependent emotional expression. A smiling face can signal the experience of enjoyable emotions, but people can also smile to convince another person that enjoyment is occurring when it is not. For this reason, the ability to discriminate between felt and faked enjoyment expressions is a crucial social skill. Despite its importance, adults show remarkable individual variation in this ability. Revealing the factors responsible for these huge individual differences is a key challenge in this domain. Here we investigated, on a large sample of participants, whether individual differences in smile authenticity recognition are accounted for by differences in the predisposition to experience other people's emotions, i.e., by susceptibility to emotional contagion. Results showed that susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions increased smile authenticity detection, while susceptibility to emotional contagion for positive emotions worsened detection performance, because it leaded to categorize most of the faked smiles as sincere. These findings suggest that susceptibility to emotional contagion plays a key role in complex emotion recognition, and point out the importance of analyzing the tendency to experience other people's positive and negative emotions as separate abilities.
authors.affiliation: Center for Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, University of Turin Torino, Italy ; Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Stanford University Stanford, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Valeria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Manera
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Grandi
authors.forename: Livia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Colle
keywords: emotional contagion; individual differences; positive and negative emotions; simulation models; smile authenticity