Emotions of my kin: disambiguating expressive body movement in minimal groups

Using a minimal group paradigm, the current study investigated the influence of group membership on the detection of negative and positive emotions from body movement. Computer animations of movement behavior expressing happiness or anger served as experimental stimuli. A pre-study served to generate and validate the stimuli. Observers were able to identify happiness and anger expressions above chance level, but they also showed a significant negativity bias in emotion ascription. However, expressive movements displayed by neutral computer characters also showed considerable levels of ambiguity. The main study investigated the influence of minimal groups on emotion recognition. Group membership was randomly assigned using green or blue jersey color for computer characters and observers. Hit rates, response times, and confidence ratings served as dependent measures. We found an interaction between group membership and emotion for category assignment and response times irrespective of judgment correctness. While there was no difference in either one of the parameters for outgroup stimuli, observers showed distinct response patterns regarding the ascription of positive and negative emotions to ingroup members. The data suggest a salience asymmetry of ingroup and outgroup members in minimal group settings. Potentially higher salience of the ingroup caused a negativity bias in the ingroup as participants ascribed more anger than happiness to ingroup avatars. However, being concordant with a potentially positive attitude towards the ingroup, anger ascriptions required longer response times compared to happiness ascriptions. In accordance with previous research, these findings point to multiple cognitive and emotional processes interplaying in emotion recognition.