Hillary Anger Elfenbein

Washington University in St. Louis | WUSTL , Wash U · Olin Business School

Researchers have proposed that variation in sex hormones across the menstrual cycle modulate the ability to recognize emotions in others. Existing research suggests that accuracy is higher during the follicular phase and ovulation compared to the luteal phase, but findings are inconsistent. Using a repeated measures design with a sample of healthy...

Purpose This study aims to test negotiation outcomes when bilinguals negotiate in a foreign rather than their native language. Decision research on the foreign language effect indicates that bilingual individuals may be less susceptible to framing bias when using a foreign language because they make less emotional and biased choices. With increasin...

We examine Emotional Intelligence (EI) as a predictor of academic performance in business school leadership coursework. Leadership requires competent interaction with subordinates on an interpersonal level. This requires interpersonal skills, such as engaging in difficult conversations. We argue that performance in a course that develops these skil...

This research takes a new perspective on the long-standing mystery of personality in negotiation, which has seen decades of null and inconsistent findings. Grounded in interactionist theories defining personality as consistency in behaviors when placed multiple times in the same situation, the investigation examines consistency in individuals’ beha...

The current study investigated what can be understood from another person’s tone of voice. Participants from five English-speaking nations (Australia, India, Kenya, Singapore, and the United States) listened to vocal expressions of nine positive and nine negative affective states recorded by actors from their own nation. In response, they wrote ope...

Age-related differences in emotion recognition have predominantly been investigated using static pictures of facial expressions, and positive emotions beyond happiness have rarely been included. The current study instead used dynamic facial and vocal stimuli, and included a wider than usual range of positive emotions. In Task 1, younger and older a...

Intuition suggests that individual differences should play an important role in negotiation performance, and yet empirical results have been relatively weak. Because negotiations are inherently dyadic, the dyad needs to feature prominently in theorizing. In expanding the traditional treatment of individual differences to two systematically intercon...

The rapidly growing body of research on the effect of emotional expressions in negotiation has been the subject of several narrative reviews. Through meta-analysis, we combine relevant findings, compare and integrate moderators, and examine the mediating mechanisms quantitatively. The analysis incorporates 64 published and unpublished studies condu...

Most research on cross-cultural emotion recognition has focused on facial expressions. To integrate the body of evidence on vocal expression, we present a meta-analysis of 37 cross-cultural studies of emotion recognition from speech prosody and nonlinguistic vocalizations, including expressers from 26 cultural groups and perceivers from 44 differen...

Empathy is relevant to many psychiatric conditions. Empathy involves the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others. Thus, emotion recognition (ER) abilities are key to understanding empathy. Despite the importance of ER to normal and abnormal social interactions, little is known about how it develops throughout...

Central to emotion science is the degree to which categories, such as Awe, or broader affective features, such as Valence, underlie the recognition of emotional expression. To explore the processes by which people recognize emotion from prosody, US and Indian participants were asked to judge the emotion categories or affective features communicated...

Emotional vocalizations are central to human social life. Recent studies have documented that people recognize at least 13 emotions in brief vocalizations. This capacity emerges early in development, is preserved in some form across cultures, and informs how people respond emotionally to music. What is poorly understood is how emotion recognition f...

Based on decades-old reviews, many negotiation researchers have expressed doubts about the effect of personality on negotiation outcomes. More recent reviews have found significant associations between traits and outcome measures. Existing research has primarily used laboratory experiments; field studies are rare. In this study, we aim to fill that...

Organizational scholars have systematically studied the negotiation process to guide the development of general descriptive and prescriptive theory. Descriptive research conducted by scholars from anthropology, law, and international relations converge on the features required for a general theory. This includes a multiphase process comprising plan...

Objectives: The premenstrual phase of cycle has long been associated with a constellation of health symptoms for women. However, there has been no recent quantitative review of severe mental health outcomes as a function of the menstrual cycle. We examine cycle influences on completed suicides, suicide attempts, suicidal ideation, and psychiatric a...

This study explored the perception of emotion appraisal dimensions on the basis of speech prosody in a cross-cultural setting. Professional actors from Australia and India vocally portrayed different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, pride, relief, sadness, serenity and shame) by enacting emotioneliciting situations. In a balanced design, participa...

Negotiations are inherently dyadic. Negotiators' individual-level characteristics may not only make them perform better or worse in general, but also may make them particularly well- or poorly-suited to negotiate with a particular counterpart. The present research estimates the extent to which performance in a distributive negotiation is affected b...

In this review, we focus on two key questions about the nature of emotional intelligence (EI). First, we consider what the different parts of EI might be, suggesting a taxonomy that builds on the well-known hierarchical four-branch model to include six narrow abilities (emotion perception, emotion expression, emotion attention regulation, emotion u...

Research on dyadic meta-accuracy suggests that people can accurately judge how their acquaintances feel toward them. However, existing studies have focused exclusively on positive feelings, such as liking. We present the first research on dyadic meta-accuracy for competition, a common dynamic among work colleagues. Data from the sales staff at a ca...

Emotional Intelligence (EI) has captivated researchers and the public alike, but it has been challenging to establish its components as objective abilities. Self-report scales lack divergent validity from personality traits, and few ability tests have objectively correct answers. We adapt the Stroop task to introduce a new facet of EI called Emotio...

This study extends previous work on emotion communication across cultures with a large-scale investigation of the physical expression cues in vocal tone. In doing so, it provides the first direct test of a key proposition of dialect theory, namely that greater accuracy of detecting emotions from one's own cultural group-known as in-group advantage-...

The present study examines the effect of language experience on vocal emotion perception in a second language. Native speakers of French with varying levels of self-reported English ability were asked to identify emotions from vocal expressions produced by American actors in a forced-choice task, and to rate their pleasantness, power, alertness and...

Instruction sheet given to participants (translated from French to English). (DOCX)

We are constantly forming impressions about those around us. Social interaction depends on our understanding of interpersonal behavior - assessing one another's personality, emotions, thoughts and feelings, attitudes, deceptiveness, group memberships, and other personal characteristics through facial expressions, body language, voice and spoken lan...

Emotions evolved to serve our need to communicate quickly and efficiently. Expressions serve as symptoms of our internal states, a signal appealing to others for action, and a symbol to convey information about an event. Expression produces outwardly visible cues interpreted by perceivers for their valuable information. Expression and perception is...

When faced with a problem, how do individuals search for potential solutions? In this article, we explore the cognitive processes that lead to local search (i.e., identifying options closest to existing solutions) and distant search (i.e., identifying options of a qualitatively different nature than existing solutions). We suggest that mind wanderi...

The commonsense notion that personal characteristics influence how effectively we negotiate has presented researchers with a mystery: Throughout the decades, scholars have concluded that there are few reliable findings to support it. In this article, I review existing research as well as new research in which my colleagues and I join a growing mino...

We examine the social perception of emotional intelligence (EI) through the use of observer ratings. Individuals frequently judge others' emotional abilities in real-world settings, yet we know little about the properties of such ratings. This article examines the social perception of EI and expands the evidence to evaluate its reliability and cros...

Negotiation has been observed to comprise of an ordered sequence of activities, with a beginning, a middle, and an end (Zartman, 2006), yet negotiation research in organizational behavior and social psychology has emphasized the study of a limited part of that spectrum – the bargaining process that occurs midway through the phenomenon. In our propo...

Considerable advancement in investigating emotional intelligence (EI) in organizations has been made, including a well-established four factor model of emotional abilities, and through studies that establish that EI matters in the workplace outcomes. However, some valid criticisms remain. Chief among them is the lack of conceptual guidance about tr...

Emotional contagion—emotions being linked across people—has captured psychologists’ attention yet little is known about its mechanisms. Early influential treatments focused on primitive mimicry. Later accounts emphasized (a) social comparison, whereby people compare their feelings with compatriots’, (b) emotional interpretation, where others’ expre...

This chapter summarizes the body of work about cultural differences in emotion recognition based on the match versus mismatch of the cultural group expressing the emotion and the cultural group perceiving the emotion. Two major perspectives have arisen to explain the well-replicated empirical finding that there tends to be better recognition of fac...

Background: Both language and music are thought to have evolved from a musical protolanguage that communicated social information, including emotion. Individuals with perceptual music disorders (amusia) show deficits in auditory emotion recognition (AER). Although auditory perceptual deficits have been studied in schizophrenia, their relationship...

The possibility of cultural differences in the fundamental acoustic patterns used to express emotion through the voice is an unanswered question central to the larger debate about the universality versus cultural specificity of emotion. This study used emotionally inflected standard-content speech segments expressing 11 emotions produced by 100 pro...

Motivation and emotion share a common theme: Both occur as a function of or in the presence of a valued object or goal. Investing attention, effort, and time into a particular goal implies value; emotion-eliciting stimuli imply that the appraiser is not indifferent to that object. In this chapter, we review implications for motivation and emotion f...

According to a longstanding consensus among researchers, individual differences play a limited role in predicting negotiation outcomes. This consensus stemmed from an early narrative review based on limited data. Testing the validity of this consensus, a meta-analysis of negotiation studies revealed a significant role for a wide range of individual...

Which emotions are associated with universally recognized non-verbal signals?We address this issue by examining how reliably non-linguistic vocalizations (affect bursts) can convey emotions across cultures. Actors from India, Kenya, Singapore, and USA were instructed to produce vocalizations that would convey nine positive and nine negative emotion...

This paper focuses on a theoretical account integrating classic and recent findings on the communication of emotions across cultures: a dialect theory of emotion. Dialect theory uses a linguistic metaphor to argue emotion is a universal language with subtly different dialects. As in verbal language, it is more challenging to understand someone spea...

Nonverbal communication is an important but under-studied element of organizational life. This chapter summarizes key insights into the functions, applications, and ubiquity of nonverbal communication in the workplace setting. The chapter is intended to provide an accessible and research-based resource by which academics and practitioners alike can...

Some negotiators simply seem well suited for the task of extracting a good deal for themselves, some seem well suited to manage a sticky situation with everyone feeling good in the end, and others seem ill suited for either. Although researchers’ focus on individual differences in negotiation tended to decrease in the wake of the pessimistic review...

There has been a longstanding consensus among researchers that individual differences play a limited role in predicting negotiation outcomes. However, this consensus results historically from early reviews that relied on limited data and problematic research designs. Questioning this consensus, a meta-analysis of negotiation studies revealed a sign...

Vocal expressions are thought to convey information about speakers' emotional states but may also reflect the antecedent cognitive appraisal processes that produced the emotions. We investigated the perception of emotion-eliciting situations on the basis of vocal expressions. Professional actors vocally portrayed different emotions by enacting emot...

One of the key criteria for whether Emotional Intelligence (EI) truly fits the definition of “intelligence” is that individual branches of EI should have at least moderate convergence with each other — however, for performance tests that measure actual ability, such convergence has been elusive. The authors approach this question using EI measures...

How I spent my summer vacation: Testifying before Congress about the value of social science.

We present intra-, inter- and cross-cultural classifications of vocal expressions. Stimuli were selected from the VENEC corpus and consisted of portrayals of 11 emotions, each expressed with 3 levels of intensity. Classification (nu-SVM) was based on acoustic measures related to pitch, intensity, formants, voice source and duration. Results showed...

Can groups become effective simply by assembling high-status individual performers? Though an affirmative answer may seem straightforward on the surface, this answer becomes more complicated when group members benefit from collaborating on interdependent tasks. Examining Wall Street sell-side equity research analysts who work in an industry in whic...

The present chapter’s purpose is fourfold. First, we review theory and recent evidence documenting that SV not only matters to negotiators, but also that it can matter in some cases more than objective value. Second, we describe some specific negotiator actions, or tactics, that existing research suggests are associated with promoting or depleting...

Abstract We investigate the psychological phenomenon of rivalry, and propose a view of competition as inherently relational, thus extending the literatures on competition between individuals, groups, and firms. Specifically, we argue that the relationships between competitors – as captured by their proximity, relative attributes and prior competiti...

Using Kenny's (1994) Social Relations Model, a block-round robin design provided the first reported evidence for dyadic effects in nonverbal communication. That is, some dyads were systematically more or less accurate than the individual-level skill of perceivers and expressors would predict. This dyadic effect appears to be similar in magnitude to...

The authors address the longstanding mystery of individual differences in negotiation performance. Using Kenny’s (1994) Social Relations Model to examine the role of individual consistency in this dyadic process, analyses showed 52% of the variance in performance resulted from individual differences. Beyond demonstrating consistency, coding systems...

Previous research on the link between individual differences in emotional expression and emotion recognition over six decades revealed widely varying results. A recent meta-analysis (Elfenbein & Eisenkraft, 2010) showed a positive correlation for displays elicited as intentional communication, but zero for naturalistic displays. However, the long-s...

How much do individuals consistently influence the way other people feel? Data from 48 work groups suggest there are consistent individual differences both in the emotions that people tend to experience (trait affect) and in the emotions that people tend to elicit in others (trait affective presence). A social relations model analysis revealed that...

A 2-round negotiation study provided evidence that positive feelings resulting from one negotiation can be economically rewarding in a second negotiation. Negotiators experiencing greater subjective value (SV)—that is, social, perceptual, and emotional outcomes from a negotiation—in Round 1 achieved greater individual and joint objective negotiatio...

The authors address the decades-old mystery of the association between individual differences in the expression and perception of nonverbal cues of affect. Prior theories predicted positive, negative, and zero correlations in performance-given empirical results ranging from r = -.80 to r = +.64. A meta-analysis of 40 effects showed a positive corre...

Previous research on the link between individual differences in emotional expression and emotion recognition over six decades revealed widely varying results. A recent meta-analysis (Elfenbein & Eisenkraft, 2009) showed a positive correlation for displays elicited as intentional communication, but zero for naturalistic displays. However, the longst...

People often need to know what others think of them - whom do we approach to collaborate, to invite out, or to seek assistance? Research on meta-perceptions shows strong evidence for generalized meta-accuracy - knowing whether the rest of the world tends to see us, e.g., as extroverted or intelligent - but less for dyadic meta-accuracy - knowing ho...

The objective of this effort was to obtain information to increase Soldiers’ ability to decode nonverbal cues (NVCs) in cross-culture interactions. Iraq was selected as the target location for this effort. We conducted a literature review, ran two focus groups with Soldiers, and videotaped Iraqi actors hired to display a series of emotions, actions...

In an era of rising concern about financial performance and social ills, companies’ economic achievements and negative externalities prompt a common question: Does it pay to be good? For thirty-five years, researchers have been investigating the empirical link between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). In...

Although negotiation experiences can affect a negotiator’s ensuing attitudes and behavior, little is known about their long-term consequences. Using a longitudinal survey design, we test the degree to which economic and subjective value achieved in job offer negotiations predicts employees’ subsequent job attitudes and intentions to turnover. Resul...

The authors address the longstanding mystery of individual differences in negotiation performance. Using Kenny's (1994) Social Relations Model to examine the role of individual consistency in this dyadic process, analyses showed 52% of the variance in performance resulted from individual differences. Beyond demonstrating consistency, coding systems...

We examine the social perception of emotional intelligence (EI) through the use of observer ratings. Individuals often judge others’ emotional abilities in real-world settings, yet we know little about the properties of such ratings. This paper examines the social perception of EI and tests the hypothesis that close observers in the environment can...

The authors address the long-standing mystery of stable individual differences in negotiation performance, on which intuition and conventional wisdom have clashed with inconsistent empirical findings. The present study used the Social Relations Model to examine individual differences directly via consistency in performance across multiple negotiati...

Emotion has become one of the most popular—and popularized—areas within organizational scholarship. This chapter attempts to review and bring together within a single framework the wide and often disjointed literature on emotion in organizations. The integrated framework includes processes detailed by previous theorists who have defined emotion as...

Using meta-analysis, we find a consistent positive correlation between emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) and goal-oriented performance. However, this existing research relies primarily on subjective perceptions of performance. The current study tested the impact of ERA on objective performance in a mixed-motive buyer-seller negotiation exercise. G...

The expression of nonverbal cues may differ systematically across cultures. Common cues used in distinct ways cross-culturally may be termed nonverbal accents. The data in this study indicate that nonverbal accents can help perceivers to distinguish the nationality of expressers. In Study 1, American participants could determine the nationality of...

The authors integrate two complementary streams of research on “fit” that document positive impacts of similarity and negative effects of dissimilarity. Fit with an organization's culture typically focuses on similarity in values whereas relational demography examines similarity in demographic attributes. Although both streams emphasize fit and dra...

Two studies provided direct support for a recently proposed dialect theory of communicating emotion, positing that expressive displays show cultural variations similar to linguistic dialects, thereby decreasing accurate recognition by out-group members. In Study 1, 60 participants from Quebec and Gabon posed facial expressions. Dialects, in the for...

Acknowledgments: We are indebted to Desiree Schaan for her assistance with coding the articles. We also appreciate insightful comments by Christopher Marquis and Nitin Nohria, research assistance by Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs, and the collegiality of Janet Kiholm Smith and Daniel Turban for sharing additional information about their published studies.