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The Impact of Partner Expressions on Felt Emotion in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: An Event-level Analysis

Social games like the prisoner's dilemma are often used to develop models of the role of emotion in social decision-making. Here we examine an understudied aspect of emotion in such games: how an individual's feelings are shaped by their partner's expressions. Prior research has tended to focus on other aspects of emotion. Research on felt-emotion has focused on how an individual's feelings shape how they treat their partner, or whether these feelings are authentically expressed. Research on expressed-emotion has focused on how an individual's decisions are shaped by their partner's expressions, without regard for whether these expressions actually evoke feelings. Here, we use computer-generated characters to examine how an individual's moment-to-moment feelings are shaped by (1) how they are treated by their partner and (2) what their partner expresses during this treatment. Surprisingly, we find that partner expressions are far more important than actions in determining self-reported feelings. In other words, our partner can behave in a selfish and exploitive way, but if they show a collaborative pattern of expressions, we will feel greater pleasure collaborating with them. These results also emphasize the importance of context in determining how someone will feel in response to an expression (i.e., knowing a partner is happy is insufficient; we must know what they are happy-at). We discuss the implications of this work for cognitive-system design, emotion theory, and methodological practice in affective computing.