title: Positive Feeling, Negative Meaning: Visualizing the Mental Representations of In-Group and Out-Group Smiles.
abstract: Even though smiles are seen as universal facial expressions, research shows that there exist various kinds of smiles (i.e., affiliative smiles, dominant smiles). Accordingly, we suggest that there also exist various mental representations of smiles. Which representation is employed in cognition may depend on social factors, such as the smiling person's group membership: Since in-group members are typically seen as more benevolent than out-group members, in-group smiles should be associated with more benevolent social meaning than those conveyed by out-group members. We visualized in-group and out-group smiles with reverse correlation image classification. These visualizations indicated that mental representations of in-group smiles indeed express more benevolent social meaning than those of out-group smiles. The affective meaning of these visualized smiles was not influenced by group membership. Importantly, the effect occurred even though participants were not instructed to attend to the nature of the smile, pointing to an automatic association between group membership and intention.
authors.affiliation: Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Paulus
authors.affiliation: Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
authors.forename: Michaela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rohr
authors.affiliation: Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.|Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Ron
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Dotsch
authors.affiliation: Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wentura
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006126:Group Processes; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008297:Male; D012904:Smiling; D012919:Social Behavior