Negotiation Strategies with Incongruent Facial Expressions of Emotion Cause Cardiovascular Threat

Negotiation Strategies with Incongruent Facial Expressions of Emotion Cause Cardiovascular Threat Peter Khooshabeh (khooshabeh@ict.usc.edu) 1, 3 Celso de Melo (demelo@usc.edu) 2 Brooks Volkman (volkman@psych.ucsb.edu) 1 Jonathan Gratch (gratch@ict.usc.edu) 3 Jim Blascovich (blascovi@psych.ucsb.edu) 1 Peter J. Carnevale (carnevale@usc.edu) 2 Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90094 affectively neutral; that is, they are associated with interactants’ positive or negative emotional states. Clearly, negotiations represent motivated performance situations to interested partners. And, experimental negotiation tasks are no exception, including those involving real human players (Van Kleef, De Dreu, & Manstead, 2004) and digital agents (i.e., player representations driven by computer algorithms, de Melo, Carnevale, & Gratch, 2011). The current work examines individuals’ motivational responses, using physiological indexes, to emotionally expressive virtual characters in a multi-issue negotiation task. Specifically, we focus on the question of how situational context affects emotion perception from facial expressions. In person-to-agent negotiation tasks, experimenters often insert communicative cues such as agent facial expressions intended to strategically manipulate user’s emotions. Agents that show emotion have now been used in several domains such as education, entertainment, training, therapy and commerce (for a review see Beale & Creed, 2009). In a multi-issue negotiation task, de Melo and colleagues (2011) reported that participants made more concessions to a virtual human that displayed an angry facial expression compared to a happy facial expression. Most research on the effects of virtual characters’ emotional facial expressions has relied on subjective responses from participants (e.g., Beale & Creed, 2009). However, given the evidence that emotion is processed via non-conscious pathways, perhaps more so than conscious pathways (Tamietto & De Gelder, 2010), validated physiological measures related to affect should provide confirmation of the operation of non-conscious emotional processes involved in motivated performance tasks such as negotiation (Blascovich & Mendes, 2010). Abstract Affect is important in motivated performance situations such as negotiation. Longstanding theories of emotion suggest that facial expressions provide enough information to perceive another person’s internal affective state. Alternatively, the contextual emotion hypothesis posits that situational factors bias the perception of emotion in others’ facial displays. This hypothesis predicts that individuals will have different perceptions of the same facial expression depending upon the context in which the expression is displayed. In this study, cardiovascular indexes of motivational states (i.e., challenge vs. threat) were recorded while players engaged in a multi- issue negotiation where the opposing negotiator (confederate) displayed emotional facial expressions (angry vs. happy); the confederate’s negotiation strategy (cooperative vs. competitive) was factorially crossed with his facial expression. During the game, participants’ eye fixations and cardiovascular responses, indexing task engagement and challenge/threat motivation, were recorded. Results indicated that participants playing confederates with incongruent facial expressions (e.g., cooperative strategy, angry face) exhibited a greater threat response, which arises due to increased uncertainty. Eye fixations also suggest that participants look at the face more in order to acquire information to reconcile their uncertainty in the incongruent condition. Taken together, these results suggest that context matters in the perception of emotion. Keywords: facial expressions, negotiation, context in emotion Introduction Negotiation is relatively common in personal and professional settings. A child might ask a parent whether she can leave the dinner table. The parent might sternly command the child to finish her vegetables and the child could make a counter offer to finish the peas but not the broccoli. This could ensue into a strategic and emotionally charged social interaction. Emotion is an important human factor in motivated performance situations (i.e., those that are self-relevant and therefore task engaging and require instrumental cognitive responses; Blascovich, 2008). Such interactions are rarely Psychophysiological Measurement of Motivational States Psychophysiological research is now a well-established technique to infer peoples’ affective reactions to various situations (Blascovich, Vanman, Mendes, & Dickerson,