Abstract
The capability to correctly recognize collective emotion expressions [i.e., emotional aperture (EA)] is crucial for effective social and work-related interactions. Yet, little remains known about the antecedents of this ability. The present study therefore aims to shed new light onto key aspects that may promote or diminish an individual’s EA. We examine the role of age for this ability in an online sample of 181 participants (with an age range of 18–72 years, located in Germany), and we investigate agreeableness as a key contingency factor. Among individuals with lower agreeableness, on the one hand, our results indicate a curvilinear relationship between age and EA, such that EA remains at a relatively high level until these individuals’ middle adulthood (with a slight increase until their late 30s) and declines afterward. Individuals with higher agreeableness, on the other hand, exhibit relatively high EA irrespective of their age. Together, these findings offer new insights for the emerging literature on EA, illustrating that specific demographic and personality characteristics may jointly shape such collective emotion recognition.
Highlights
Recognizing and deciphering others’ emotion expressions is an important interpersonal skill that critically shapes social functioning (Carstensen et al, 1997; Keltner and Kring, 1998)
Besides cognitive capabilities, research has shown that correctly identifying other individuals’ emotions requires an actor’s motivation to attend to others’ emotion expressions (Buck, 1988; Marsh and Blair, 2008). Generalizing this notion toward emotional aperture (EA), we propose that individuals are more likely to use their cognitive potentials to decipher group emotions to the extent they are interested in others
We found that age is negatively related with individuals’ EA (r = −0.29, p < 0.01), whereas EA is not significantly associated with agreeableness (r = 0.07, ns) or any of the potential control variables
Summary
Recognizing and deciphering others’ emotion expressions is an important interpersonal skill that critically shapes social functioning (Carstensen et al, 1997; Keltner and Kring, 1998). Recent theory suggests that it is often important to grasp other individuals’ emotion displays, but to simultaneously assess the emotions expressed by a group of others (Sanchez-Burks and Huy, 2009). Such “emotional aperture” (EA) reflects the ability to recognize a group’s overall emotional composition by focusing on the global picture of diverse emotion expressions within a collective (Sanchez-Burks and Huy, 2009; see Navon, 1977). Research has illustrated EA as a unique capability (distinct from individual emotion recognition) that relates with important behaviors and outcomes in organizations (e.g., leaders’ transformational behavior toward their followers; Sanchez-Burks et al, 2016)
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