Influence of Emotion Dynamics on Interpersonal Liking

Learning others’ emotional patterns facilitates social functioning. Do emotion prediction failures then negatively influence interpersonal connection? In two studies we investigated whether atypicality of a target’s emotions influences how much others like them. Participants (N = 1,250) completed a task where they observed the emotional transitions of a target before predicting their next emotion. In the task, we manipulated emotional transition probabilities to model differences in emotional typicality and measured participants’ prediction accuracy and target liking. In study 1, we found that a target with normative emotion transition probabilities was more liked than a target with random emotion transitions, while a target with atypical emotions was least liked. In study 2, we investigated different aspects of atypical emotion transitions (predictability of the next emotion, overall frequency of positive emotions, and valence volatility) found that each aspect influenced learning accuracy, but variation in liking was only related to valence volatility and frequency of positive states. These results inform what processes underly interpersonal bonding or dysfunction.