274 Understanding Intuitive Decision Making
gave the professors similar ratings after viewing silent video clips just fi ve seconds and two seconds
long. Surprisingly, the students’ ratings were highly correlated with ratings made by the professors’
actual students after a full semester of classes.^185 Similar experiments with thin-slice exposures to
others’ nonverbal behaviors fi nd that audience members can also make accurate inferences about
trial outcomes,^186 employees’ status within a company,^187 and conversing partners’ IQs.^188
In addition to making fast and accurate inferences about others’ personality traits, audiencemembers are also accurate when making other types of inferences based on nonverbal behaviors.
For example, listeners can reliably predict a manager’s job performance based solely on the man-
ager’s tone of voice.^189 From nonverbal vocal cues alone, listeners can determine not only a speaker’s
gender,^190 age,^191 socioeconomic background,^192 ethnic group,^193 and place of origin,^194 but also
their status in small groups.^195
Perception of Professionals’ Emotion-Related Behaviors
For the audience to comprehend which emotion a professional is experiencing, they must fi rst be
able to see, hear, and recognize that professional’s verbal and nonverbal behaviors. Even the direc-
tion of a speaker’s eye gaze is an important nonverbal visual cue to their emotions. Direct eye gaze
enhances the audience’s perception of both anger and joy whereas averted eye gaze enhances their
perception of fear and sadness.^196 An often cited study fi nds that audience perceptions of a speaker’s
emotions are determined 55% by nonverbal visual cues, 38% by nonverbal vocal cues, and only 7%
by the verbal content of the speaker’s message.^197
One of the most important nonverbal visual cues to others’ emotions is their facial expression ofemotion (see Figure 6.2). There is widespread cross-cultural agreement about the emotions certain
facial expressions communicate.^198 A review of 25 studies involving participants from more than
35 cultures worldwide fi nds that people in different cultures exhibit similar prototypical facial dis-
plays of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, pride, sadness, surprise, and happiness when in comparable
situations.^199
The specifi c emotions an audience can infer on the basis of another’s facial expressions includehappiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, and surprise.^200 A series of electromyograph (EMG)
studies of viewers looking at photographs of happy and sad facial expressions demonstrated that
audiences can infer emotions from facial expressions automatically. Viewers smile slightly when
looking at happy faces and frown slightly when looking at angry faces even when the photographs
of the faces are presented to them subliminally.^201
Although perceiving another’s emotions can be done automatically, it does take some effort. Aneye-fi xation study fi nds that viewers who are asked to identify another’s emotion make signifi cantly
more fi xations on faces that express emotion than on faces expressing no emotion. On average,
viewers in the study made 11 fi xations on faces that showed emotion versus 6.5 fi xations on neutral
FIGURE 6.2 Audiences Scan Others’ Facial Expressions to Infer Their Emotions
Source: The Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) Database. Lyons, Akamatsu, Kamachi, and Gyoba (1998 , p. 203)