ABSTRACT
O ur interpretation of others' emotions depends upon more than simply the facial, vocal, and postural expressions they display or the presence and absence of obvious emotion elicitors in the environment. Rather, the meaning of these expressions, even when they take the prototypical forms demonstrated to have some generality across social groups and cultures (e.g., Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002), are filtered in part through the lenses of our specific social relationship to the sender. Such factors as the relative status, gender, and race of the perceiver and expresser may all directly or indirectly impact on the emotion recognition process. In this chapter we will emphasize the influence that norms and beliefs, as well as the social characteristics of both the encoder and the decoder, have on the perception of emotion. The operation of these factors in social communication obviously opens the door to misunderstandings when we interact with others who differ from us on such dimensions as gender, racial grouping, or facial appearance.
