Person Perception in Audience Decision Making 279Comprehension of Professionals’ Traits and Emotions
How audiences infer a person’s traits or comprehend a person’s character from observations of their
behaviors is a central concern of the fi eld of person perception as well as the fi eld that grew out of
it—social cognition.^256 As we have seen, audiences quickly and spontaneously encode perceived
behaviors in terms of trait categories, such as friendliness, dominance, competence, and intelli-
gence.^257 Audiences also quickly and spontaneously encode perceived behaviors in terms of specifi c
emotions, such as fear, anger, and happiness.^258
Although spontaneous, the ability to comprehend another’s traits is a learned skill and requiresmore than simply perceiving their behaviors. As developmental psychologists have observed, young
children do not explain others’ behaviors in terms of their traits. Instead, they explain behaviors in
terms of the concrete situations that others are involved in.^259
Just as the ability to comprehend another person’s traits is a learned skill, the ability to compre-hend another’s emotions is a learned skill as well and requires more than simply perceiving another’s
behaviors. In a study of emotion comprehension, children aged 5 to 14 years watched videos of
speakers who were either happy, angry, sad, or emotionally neutral. Chronological age was a sig-
nifi cant predictor of a child’s ability to infer a speaker’s emotions, with older children doing better
than younger ones. Verbal intelligence is another signifi cant predictor of a child’s ability to infer
another’s emotions.^260
The process of comprehending another’s traits sometimes includes more than one step.If the audience is not preoccupied with other tasks, it may use situational information to
modify or correct initial trait inferences. In a study of how audiences comprehend speak-
ers’ traits, two groups listened to a speaker read either a proabortion or an antiabortion
speech. Both groups received the same situational information: The speaker had not writ-
ten the speech but had been assigned to read a speech written by another person. One
group simply listened to the speaker. The other group listened to the speaker knowing
that later they would be asked to write and read aloud a speech of their own. The first
group who simply listened discounted the speech’s verbal content when inferring the
speaker’s traits. They took into account the fact that the speaker had been assigned to read
a speech she had not written. In contrast, the preoccupied group inferred the speaker’s
traits based on the speech’s verbal content and neglected to adjust their initial impressions
to account for the situational information they had been given.^261 Once audience mem-
bers develop an understanding of someone’s personality traits, they are usually reluctant
to revise it.^262
Just as they do in trait comprehension, audiences may also take into account situational variableswhen trying to comprehend another’s emotions. In a study of emotion comprehension, audience
members viewed ambiguous or unambiguous facial reactions of target individuals to emotional sit-
uations. When the audience tried to identify ambiguous facial expressions, the emotional situation
to which the target individual was reacting had a signifi cant infl uence on the audience’s inferences
about the target’s emotions.^263
Brain Regions Activated. Neuroscientists fi nd that a different set of brain regions are activatedwhen audience members engage in controlled, as opposed to purely spontaneous, forms of person
perception. When audience members take into account situational information and revise the