The Influence Of Social Knowledge And Facial Expression Information On The Inference Of Social Status

Social status refers to the amount of respect,ability,reputation or resources,an individual has in the social hierarchy.Reputation and dominance are two ways to obtain social status.Previous studies mostly focused on individuals’ perception of their own social status.At present,researchers turn to individuals’ inference of others’ social status.Facial expression,body posture,dressing style and social classification information have been proved to be the factors affecting social status inference.Among them,facial expression is a very important clue.Researchers believe that there is an expression effect of face social perception,that is,people will unconsciously infer other characteristics of face owners through other people’s facial expressions.Although facial expression is very important for the inference of others’ social status,the recent two-dimensional model of social cognitive evaluation believes that evaluation information,namely "competence" and "warmth",will convey a person’s behavior intention and the ability to implement intention to others,and further affect an individual’s judgment of his social status.As for whether and how the facial expression of the perceived person is affected by the social evaluation information of others in the inference of others’ social status,there is no clear research result.In view of this,this study discusses the influence of facial expression and social evaluation information on social status inference through two studies which include eight behavioral experiments.Study 1 verified the influence of facial expression and social evaluation information on social prestige status inference.The results show that facial expression and social evaluation information jointly affect the inference of others’ reputation;Study 2 further verified the influence of facial expression and social evaluation information on the inference of social dominance.The results show that facial expression and social evaluation information jointly affected the inference of others’ dominance.In Study 1,experiment 1 explored the impact of competence matching of happy,neutral or sad facial expressions information on reputation.The results show that: positive emotion can improve individual reputation,while negative emotion can reduce individuals’ reputation;High competence information can enhance the reputation of individuals,while low competence information can reduce the reputation of individuals;the reputation of women is significantly higher than the men’s.In addition,low competence information has a more obvious effect on the reduction of reputation of positive emotion,and negative expression has a greater negative effect on women’s reputation.Experiment 2 explored the influence of competence and anger,fear or neutral expressions matching on the inference of reputation.The results show that the reputation of anger and fear facial expressions was significantly lower than the neutral expression.In addition,compared with fear expression,anger relatively improves men’s reputation.Experiment 3 explored the influence of the matching of warmth and happy,neutral or sad expressions information on the reputation.The results show that: high warmth can promote the reputation of individuals,while low warmth can reduce the reputation of individuals;High warmth improve women’s reputation,while low warmth information significantly reduce the reputation of positive expression,especially women’s positive expressions.Experiment 4 explored the effects of warmth and anger,fear or neutral expressions on the inference of reputation.The results further verified the findings of the previous three experiments.In Study 2,experiment 5 explored the effects of competence matching of happy,neutral or sad facial expressions information on dominance.The results show that the dominance of individuals with happy and neutral expressions was not different,but they were higher than the sad expression;High competence promotes individual’s dominance,while low competence reduces individual’s dominance;the dominance of men is significantly higher than the women.Experiment 6 explored the influence of competence and anger,fear and neutral facial expressions matching on the inference of dominance.The results show that the dominance of anger expression was significantly higher than neutral and fear,and the dominance of neutral expression was slightly higher than the fear.In addition,high competence can significantly improve the dominance of neutral expression.Experiment 7 explored the influence of the matching of warmth and happy,neutral and or expressions on dominance.The results show that the dominance of neutral face was significantly higher than the happy and sad,and the dominance of sad expression was slightly higher than the happy;High warmth reduces the individual’s dominance,and low warmth improves the individual’s dominance.Experiment 8 explored the effects of the matching of warmth and anger,fear or neutral facial expression on the inference of dominance.The results further found that for men,the dominance was lower when they showed fear expressions.Combining the two studies,the results show that:(1)facial expressions have different inference effects on different types of social status.When inferring the reputation of others,people mainly rely on the valence of expression,that is,the reputation of individuals with positive expression is higher than the individuals with negative emotion;When inferring the dominance of others,the dominance of anger face is higher than the neutral or other negative faces,while the dominance of positive expression is lower than the neutral expression.(2)Social knowledge information plays different roles in different types of social status inference.High competence and high warmth information all improve the individual’s reputation,while low competence or low warmth information all reduce the reputation;High competence and low warmth improve the individual’s dominance,while low competence or high warmth reduce the individual’s dominance.(3)The inference of facial expression on social status is affected by social knowledge.Negative social knowledge,whether low competence or low warmth information,can reduce the reputation of individuals who show positive expressions;Competence information will improve,or at least will not reduce the dominance of individuals who show happy emotions,while warmth information will not improve,but also reduce the dominance of individuals who show happy emotions;Warmth information is very important to women,and low warmth information has a greater negative impact on women’s social reputation.