This episode is in a domain that I am less familiar with, so I had to read a few papers in preparation for this. I had fun summarizing these findings, and I hope you enjoy reading them as well.

A lot of emotions have a social component. They are often triggered by other people, expressed to other people, and regulated to comply with social norms.

In many cases, we draw information from emotional expressions, which helps us quickly grasp a situation and navigate social dynamics. Interestingly, different emotional expressions under the same condition can convey different social information. For instance, when there is a wrongdoing and it’s ambiguous who is responsible, expressions of regret make people infer that the speaker was responsible, while expressions of anger signal that someone else is (Van Doorn et al. 2015).

Culture and Emotion Expression

For instance, Latin Americans place strong value on family and community (similar to East Asians) and are considered quite collectivistic. At the same time, they are also very emotionally expressive—unlike East Asians. Emotional expressiveness has often been considered a hallmark of individualism. So what drives this paradox?

Salvador and her colleagues (2022) argue that past research linking emotional expression to independence has focused almost exclusively on European Americans and East Asians. Because European Americans are more emotionally expressive than East Asians, it may have seemed natural to conclude that emotion expression is a criterion to judge whether a person is independent or interdependent. 

But the motivations behind expression differ. European Americans express emotions to reflect what they truly feel—to be authentic and independent. Latin Americans, on the other hand, express positive emotions to maintain social bonds. That is, they express positive emotions to adhere to the social norms of that community, even when it is not entirely reflective of what they truly feel. 

Emotion as a Signal of Quality

If a vendor tells you they really enjoy brewing their beer, would you be willing to pay more for it? A paper by Paley et al. (2024) shows that people are willing to pay more for a product when they know the maker enjoyed producing it. The enjoyment signals intrinsic motivation and dedication to the process, which people interpret as a signal of higher quality.

Paradoxically, for the sellers, if they enjoy the process of producing something, the enjoyment itself is already intrinsically a reward for them, therefore, they are actually willing to charge less. This asymmetry creates a gap the seller could potentially capitalize on. So next time you make something by hand for someone, be sure to highlight how much you enjoyed making it—they may value it more.

Regulating Others’ Emotions

Another fascinating area is interpersonal emotion regulation—how we attempt to regulate others’ emotions.

This is about how we attempt to regulate the emotions of other people. This phenomenon is rather common, you can think about how we try to comfort other people when they suffer from some hardships. However, the paper that I want to discuss is not about how we regulate the emotions of others when they experience them, but how we anticipate the emotion response of others and act accordingly to avoid such negative emotions. 

Imagine that you and your best friend both enter a contest—and you win, but they don’t. Would you share the good news with them?

Many of us have hidden success at some point. One motivation is empathy—we do not want others to feel envious or sad, especially when the success is in a domain that matters to them.

This is essentially an attempt to protect the relationship. But does it actually help?

A study by Roberts, Levine, and Sezer (2021) shows the opposite: hiding success may actually hurt our relationships.

Why?

When people discover that you hid good news from them, they may feel insulted or distanced. They try to infer why you kept it from them—and may conclude that you assumed they would be too petty or insecure to be happy for you. In other words, they see it as condescending and start to question how close you really are.

Of course, there can be many reasons we choose not to share our success—but this research highlights a potential unintended consequence: it may weaken the very bond we were trying to protect.

In sum, a lot of emotions are inherently social, and I find it fascinating how emotions can convey so much social information, influence our decision-making, and how the mere anticipation of the emotions of others can already change our behaviors.