Social Category Congruity, Group Membership, and the Boundaries of Appropriate Emotional Expression

Emotions are crucial to social functioning. They motivate behavior, shape attitudes, and signal feelings and intentions to others. At the same time, emotions are complex, ambiguous, and fleeting. As a result, how an emotional expression is interpreted is influenced by factors in addition to the expression itself, such as the context in which it is expressed, what emotions are expected, and the social categories to which the expresser is perceived to belong. In the present Dissertation, I demonstrate that how an individual is categorized is influential both prior to an emotion's expression, by setting up expectations for which emotions are more likely to be displayed, and once an emotion has been expressed, by coloring judgments of the appropriateness of the expression.;Gender is one important social category that has been shown to influence how emotional expressions are perceived and evaluated. However, people belong to other significant social categories that intersect with gender and likely also influence emotion perception and evaluation. Accordingly, the six studies presented in this Dissertation examine the intersection of gender with status, race, and group membership. The introductory chapter describes the relevant previous research and theoretical framework that guided the empirical work. The following three chapters present six studies designed to test key aspects of the proposed framework. In Chapters 2 and 3, I describe the results of two sets of studies examining how race and status each moderate the congruity of particular emotions with gender categories. I employed a series of speeded categorization tasks to test the hypothesis that expectations for emotion would differ depending on whether targets are categorized by single-identity or intersectional-identity categories. Specifically, response times to categorize faces displaying emotion expressions differed depending on whether they were categorized by only their gender or whether both their gender and status (Chapter 2) or gender and race (Chapter 3) were taken into account.;Although the language that people use to assess whether an emotional display is appropriate or not suggests that there is an optimal amount of emotion that an expresser is either exceeding or failing to reach, the standards of what is appropriate emotion are highly subjective and likely shift with how the target is categorized in a given context. In two studies (Chapter 4), I provide support for the hypothesis that emotional expressions are perceived as less appropriate when displayed by targets who are categorized as outgroup compared to ingroup members. Because there is no objective criterion of appropriateness, biases in perceptions of emotional appropriateness are likely particularly powerful. The implications of such judgments for perceptions of emotional control and for how men and women are evaluated are discussed.;I conclude by considering the implications of the present work as well as several avenues for future research. Together these studies advance the current understanding of how social categorization shapes emotion perception by examining the intersection of multiple social categories and the implicit and subjective ways in which emotion is perceived.