Relationship beliefs and emotion: Reciprocal effects

Abstract

Beliefs and emotions are tied together in many ways. In recent years the connections between beliefs and emotions receiving the most attention are those existing within a single person. That is, many researchers have asked just how and why a person's beliefs influence his or her own affective experiences; others have asked just how and why a person's affective states influence his or her own beliefs. Such work is well represented in the present volume. This chapter, however, is written from a different perspective – an interpersonal rather than an intrapersonal perspective- something that, as Ekman and Davidson (1994) have noted, has been given “short shrift” among psychologists interested in emotion.2 We address two broad questions: First, how do people's beliefs about their relationships with others influence their expressions of emotions to those others? Second, how do experiences and expressions of emotion influence beliefs about relationships? In answering these questions we argue for the idea that the structure of social relationships has important implications for understanding the experience, expression and interpretation of emotions. In so doing, we follow in the tradition of others who have noted the importance of understanding social structure for understanding emotion. This tradition includes researchers who have emphasized how status and power influence expressions of emotion (Kemper, 1978, 1993), those who emphasize how gender roles influence the expression of emotion (Brody, 1985; Brody & Hall, 1993; Timmers, Fischer, & Manstead, 1998), and Hochschild who has argued that the nature of one's job may require “emotion work” (Hochschild, 1975,1979,1990).