= Solution
\b[<Social appraisal> explains an important route of interpersonal influence, including influence without deliberate <emotion> labeling, but it is not established as the sole explanation of implicit transfer.] The first task is to distinguish outcomes. <Interpersonal emotion transfer> occurs when another person's reaction changes one's own <emotion>. <Emotional contagion> more specifically involves matching affect; <facial mimicry> is a congruent motor response and need not include a matching feeling. A common event can also change two people's feelings independently, creating <correlation> without interpersonal transfer.
<Social appraisal theory> proposes that another person's reaction supplies information about an event's significance. A companion's unease may make an uncertain decision seem riskier; their <excitement> may suggest an opportunity. The observer's relationship, goals and assessment of the companion's knowledge affect the interpretation. Such evaluation can be rapid and nonverbal. Therefore an absence of consciously naming the companion's <anxiety> is not sufficient to rule out <social appraisal>. Equally, if appraisal is invoked whenever any influence occurs, the account loses the independent mechanism needed for an explanation.
<Brian Parkinson> and colleagues' 2009 diary study collected accounts of decisions involving other people from 41 participants over three weeks. Reports of participants' <anxiety> and <excitement> related to the <emotions> attributed to the other person. Risk and importance appraisals partly accounted for the <anxiety> relationship, but did not eliminate the other person's predictive contribution. The design provides evidence outside a single laboratory induction and connects interpersonal affect with reported evaluative content. It is also observational: shared circumstances, selective reports and unmeasured interpretations remain alternatives.<Affecting others by Brian Parkinson and others>[2009, diary design, risk and importance appraisals, and residual affect associations]{ref}
In particular, statistical adjustment does not settle the causal route. Imperfectly measured appraisal can leave a residual association even if the underlying process is entirely evaluative. Conversely, partial statistical mediation does not establish that changing the measured appraisal would change feeling: a shared cause can affect both. A residual after adjusting for explicit perceptions of another's feeling is compatible with implicit transfer, but is not a direct awareness manipulation and does not prove that every appraisal was absent. The diary findings support a mixed-process interpretation more readily than a clean estimate of independent automatic and cognitive pathways.
Rapid muscular effects supply a different kind of evidence. <Ulf Dimberg> and colleagues in 2000 presented happy, angry or neutral target faces for 30 milliseconds, followed by neutral masking faces. Surface recordings over facial <muscles> revealed differential responses consistent with the target expressions, despite masking intended to prevent conscious target perception. This shows that some facial responding need not await a deliberate instruction to imitate. It does not establish that the observer felt the corresponding <happiness> or <anger>, or that evaluation of significance was absent.<Unconscious facial reactions to emotional facial expressions by Ulf Dimberg and others>[2000, pp. 86–89, backward masking and facial electromyographic responses]{ref}
The distinction between motor matching and feeling is supported by <Ursula Hess> and colleagues' 2001 study of weak, dynamic expressions. It found evidence of mimicry across the tested expression types, and evidence of <emotional contagion> for <happiness> and <sadness>, but its mediation analyses did not confirm a link from mimicry to contagion or recognition. This is evidence against assuming that observing a matching <muscle> response automatically establishes the whole mimicry–feedback–feeling sequence. It is not proof that such a route never operates: measurement precision and the tested setting bound a negative result.<Facial mimicry and emotional contagion to dynamic emotional facial expressions and their influence on decoding accuracy by Ursula Hess and others>[2001, abstract, results and mediation analyses]{ref}
Appraisal also predicts complementary responses that a simple matching rule misses. <Gerben A. van Kleef> and colleagues in 2004 supplied emotional information about an opponent during computer-mediated bargaining. Participants made larger concessions to an angry than to a happy opponent, with evidence that information about the opponent's limits mattered. Another's <anger> can signal difficulty or threat and prompt one's own caution rather than matching <anger>. These experiments establish an informative interpersonal function of <emotion> communications; their explicit messages do not by themselves demonstrate unconscious appraisal in the masked-face paradigm.<The interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations by Gerben A. van Kleef and others>[2004, Experiments 1–2, communicated emotion, inferred limits and concessions]{ref}
The theories can therefore be partly complementary. A face can evoke <facial mimicry>, alter an appraisal of the situation, and attract <attention> at the same time. <Facial feedback> may contribute to feeling, but the 2019 synthesis gives no warrant for assuming a strong obligatory effect from every small muscular response. Learned associations, shared stimulation and report expectations also require consideration. Calling a process implicit must specify what is unavailable to awareness: the expression, the change in one's own state, or the causal relationship between them. These are distinct experimental claims.
A stronger discriminating experiment would vary the displayed reaction independently of the common event and independently of the expresser's relevance to that event. The same ambiguous display could come from an informed adviser or an uninformed observer; a common physical elicitor should be matched across conditions. Predictions about perceived risk, goals and the resulting feeling should be specified before measurement. If appraisal is the route, changing the informational relevance should alter the predicted evaluative content and transfer, beyond differences in face visibility. Testing a mimicry route requires an independent manipulation with a motor control condition: facial restriction can itself alter effort and <attention>, so it is not automatically a selective intervention on feedback.
The experiment should record <facial electromyography>, time-linked appraisals and felt-state reports separately. Awareness tests should be appropriate to the actual target-mask sequence and sensitive enough to bound residual discrimination. Randomizing expressions supports their total causal effect, whereas establishing <causal mediation> still needs control of mediator–outcome <confounding> or a defensible mediator intervention. Mere disappearance of one regression coefficient after adding another is insufficient. Nor should repeated observations from the same participant or pair be treated as independent <replications>.
\b[<Social appraisal> has explanatory strength because it predicts whose <emotion> matters, what the observer infers and when responses should complement rather than copy. Existing implicit-transfer evidence leaves room for it, while muscular responding and observational residuals do not uniquely establish or refute it. The justified account is multiple potentially interacting routes, with appraisal contributing where independently measured meaning changes support it.]
Back to article page
