The Dissociation of Emotion Expression from Emotion Experience: A Personality Perspective

Abstract

When we want to know what others are feeling, we look to the face for clues. However, individual differences matter: Some faces are more expressive than others. Do both emotion experience and dispositional expressivity predict emotion expression? Based on an analysis of display rules, the authors hypothesized that expressivity would moderate the relation between experience and expression for negative, but not for positive, emotion. Study 1 examined the relation between habitual emotion experience and peer-rated expressive behavior and showed the predicted moderator effect for negative emotion: Experience was related to expression only for dispositionally high-expressivity participants, not for low-expressivity participants. For positive emotion, however, experience was related to expression for both groups. Study 2 replicated these findings using momentary emotion experience and objectively coded expressive behavior during films that elicited amusement and sadness. Results are interpreted in terms of low-expressivity individuals' propensity to dynamically regulate negative emotion-expressive behavior.