Journal
PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
Volume 37, Issue 12, Pages 1551-1563Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0146167211415629
Keywords
relationships; accommodation; facial EMG; emotion regulation; communal orientation
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The present research investigated whether accommodation, typically formulated as the tendency to deliberately inhibit a destructive reaction in response to a partner's destructive behavior, could also occur spontaneously. Supporting this notion, results of the first study revealed that participants respond to their partner's angry face with a spontaneous smile, whereas strangers' angry faces are mimicked and thus lead to a spontaneous frown. Importantly, the facial EMG data are moderated by participants' daily interaction styles: People perceiving themselves in a communal relationship show spontaneous acts of accommodation, whereas this is not the case for people in exchange relationships. The moderation occurred in our first (spontaneous) and third (forced accommodation) studies. The results of the second study replicated the first study in that participants in communal relationships frowned less toward partner's subliminally presented angry faces but more to their sad faces. The authors discuss their findings as spontaneous social emotion regulation.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available