What is it about your face that tells me what you want from me? Emotional appeals are associated with specific mental images.

Emotional facial expressions have a communicative function. Besides information about the internal states (emotions) and the intentions of the expresser (action tendencies), they also communicate what the expresser wants the observer to do (appeals). Yet, there is very little research on the association of appeals with specific emotions. The present study has the aim to study the mental association of appeals and expressions through reverse correlation. Using reverse correlation, we estimated the observer-specific internal representations of expressions associated with four different appeals. A second group of participants rated the resulting expressions. As predicted, we found that the appeal to celebrate was uniquely associated with a happy expression and the appeal to empathize with a sad expression. A pleading appeal to stop was more strongly associated with sadness than with anger, whereas a command to stop was comparatively more strongly associated with anger. The results show that observers internally represent appeals as specific emotional expressions.

The bidirectional influence of emotion expressions and context: emotion expressions, situational information and real-world knowledge combine to inform observers' judgments of both the emotion expressions and the situation.

We proposed and tested the notion of a bidirectional influence of emotion expressions and context. In two studies (N = 215, N = 222), we found that the expressions shown by supporters and opponents of a player in a ball game were used by observers to correctly deduce the eliciting situation - i.e. the outcome of the game. Conversely, knowledge of the outcome of the game (as well as real world knowledge of the negative interdependence of opponents in a competitive game) influenced the perception of both the emotions shown (Study 1) and the perceived bias/emotional control exhibited by the expressers (Study 2). This research contributes to a growing body of research that shows that both situations and emotion expressions contain intrinsic meaningful information and that both sources of information are used by observers in a social appraisal process.

On the malleability of the meaning of contexts: the influence of another person's emotion expressions on situation perception.

Research on the relationship between context and facial expressions generally assumes a unidirectional effect of context on expressions. However, according to the model of the meaning of emotion expressions in context (MEEC) the effect should be bidirectional. The present research tested the effect of emotion expression on the interpretation of scenes. A total of 380 participants either (a) rated facial expressions with regard to the likely appraisal of the eliciting situation by the emoter, (b) appraised the scenes alone or (c) appraised scenes shown together with the expressions they supposedly elicited. The findings strongly supported the MEEC. When a scene was combined with an expression signalling a situation that is undesirable, or high in locus of control or sudden, the participants appraised the scene correspondingly. Thus, the meaning of scenes is malleable and affected by the way that people are seen to react to them.

The bidirectional relation of emotion perception and social judgments: the effect of witness' emotion expression on perceptions of moral behaviour and vice versa.

The present research tested the notion that emotion expression and context perception are bidirectionally related. Specifically, in two studies focusing on moral violations (N = 288) and positive moral deviations (N = 245) respectively, we presented participants with short vignettes describing behaviours that were either (im)moral, (in)polite or unusual together with a picture of the emotional reaction of a person who supposedly had been a witness to the event. Participants rated both the emotional reactions observed and their own moral appraisal of the situation described. In both studies, we found that situational context influenced how emotional reactions to this context were rated and in turn, the emotional expression shown in reaction to a situation influenced the appraisal of the situation. That is, neither the moral events nor the emotion expressions were judged in an absolute fashion. Rather, the perception of one also depended on the other.

The role of emotion transition for the perception of social dominance and affiliation.

Individuals who show anger are rated as higher in dominance and lower in affiliation, whereas those who express sadness are rated lower in dominance and higher in affiliation. Little is known about situations where people show both expressions in sequence as happens when a first emotional reaction is followed by a second, different one. This question was examined in two studies. Overall, we found that the last emotion shown had a strong impact on perceived behavioural intentions. However, the information about the previously shown emotion was also integrated. The specific mode of integration was dependent on the salience of the change and naive theories about the type of person who changes their emotion in the face of changing events.

Impact of a polysidpersed fuel distribution on the ignition characteristic.

Determining the thermal profile of ignition is important because the desired ignition behavior varies with the objective. For example, extended ignition prolongs the time that the engine runs; however, fast ignition offers a higher power gain. The pollution caused by undesirable chemical reactions, as determined by the ignition profile, is another important aspect. Based on a previously developed method, we examined the impact of different theoretical particle size distributions (PSDs) on the thermal ignition profile. We compared different PSDs of polydispersed fuel spray with normal distributions with various means, each corresponding to the same fuel volume.  Our results revealed a significant dependence of thermal ignition on the PSD. Systems that comprised only low-radius droplets did not reach ignition, whereas systems with only high-radius droplets required a long time to establish ignition. Moreover, the change in the mean droplet radius unexpectedly resulted in a double hump in the maximum temperature of the combustion process.

Emotions as signals of normative conduct.

Social interactions are heavily norm-based and these norms need to be learned. For this, the emotional reactions of other's in response to a norm transgression can serve as signals. We were able to show that when a group responds with anger to a norm transgressing behaviour, participants were better able to correctly infer the norm than when the group responded with sadness or emotional neutrality. We further tested a process-model showing that this inference is based on the participants' understanding of the groups' appraisals of the behaviour. That is, participants who were able to reverse engineer the underlying appraisal of norm-incompatibility from the emotion expressions inferred the norm more readily. Humans as a social species, require efficient means to quickly adapt to new situations and to perform flawlessly in social contexts. Emotion information is one of the instruments that can be used in this quest.

Anger and shame as determinants of perceived competence.

Emotions are complex signals conveying a multitude of "messages" concomitantly. This idea is examined within the context of competence inferences drawn from the emotional expressions of another individual. In two studies, participants assuming the role of patients took part in a simulated medical consultation. They encountered a physician who had either a high or a standard professional status, and who responded with anger, shame, or emotional neutrality when asked to clarify the advice he dispensed. While a display of anger did not affect perceived competence, shame made the physician appear less competent. Three types of signals conveyed by the emotions were responsible for these effects: the physician's decisiveness and control over the situation, and the extent to which he felt professionally devalued by the patient's request, mediated the effects of the emotions on perceived competence. A priori information about the physician's professional status had little effect on the perception of competence. The research exemplifies the richness of information contained in emotions, and the complex way in which it allows observers to construe an impression of the expresser.

The social signal value of emotions.

Human interactions are replete with emotional exchanges. In these exchanges information about the emotional state of the interaction partners is only one type of information conveyed. In addition, emotion displays provide information about the interaction partners' disposition and the situation as such. That is, emotions serve as social signals. Acknowledging this role of emotions, this special section brings together research that illustrates how both person perception and situational understanding can be derived from emotional displays and the modulation of this process through context. Three contributions focus on information about expressers and their intentions. An additional article focuses on the informative value of emotional expressions for an observer's construal of social situations and another article exemplifies the way context determines the social impact of emotions. Finally, the last article presents the dynamic nature of mutual influence of emotions. In an attempt to integrate these contributions and offer lenses for future research, this editorial offers a contextualised model of social perception which attempts to systematise not only the types of information that emotion expressions can convey, but also to elaborate the notion of context.

Drastic Reduction Inpatient Visits to the Emergency Department in a Hospital in Israel During the COVID-19 Outbreak, Compared to the H1N1 2009.

BACKGROUND: On February 26, 2020, the first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was detected in Israel. The Ministry of Health (MoH) instructed people to take isolation measures and restrict their movement. Similarly, there was a gradual decrease in the number of visits to our emergency department (ED). OBJECTIVES: To describe the decline in the referrals to the ED and in-hospital beds occupancy during the COVID-19 pandemic and to compare it to the H1N1 2009 pandemic. METHODS: Employing a cross-sectional epidemiologic study, the pattern of visits to the ED during the COVID-19 was compared with the pattern of visits during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, as well as a year without a pandemic. The data was adjusted to consider changes in population size. The Welch t test for unpaired, unequal samples was used to analyze the data. RESULTS: Within 2 months of the COVID-19 outbreak, the average number of visits to the ED dropped by 30.2% and the hospital occupancy by 29.2% (a minimum of 57%), compared to the same period, the year before. In comparison to the same period during the H1N1 outbreak, we witnessed a significant decline in the number of visits to the ED during the COVID-19 outbreak. CONCLUSION: The behavior of people during the COVID-19 pandemic was different from their behavior during the H1N1 pandemic. People seemed to avoid visiting the ED. The boundary between precaution and panic in the generation of the media could be very thin. Decision-makers must take this into account.

Emotional expressions as appeals to recipients.

Emotion expressions convey information. One important kind of information, from a communicative perspective, is information about what is demanded of the recipients of the expression. Compared to the vast body of research that focuses on whether, and to what degree, emotion expressions convey information about inner states, there is surprisingly little systematic research on the information emotion expressions convey about what the expresser wants the recipient to do. The present research documents for the first time the set of appeals associated with the expressions of anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and disgust. In two studies, we found that (a) generally, for each emotional expression, a core appeal is perceived as being made on recipients, but also a range of complementary demands, and that (b) context matters, as is the case for social perception of emotions in general. In this case, who caused the emotion expression affects the mapping between emotional expressions and appeals. Finally, (c) recipients report intentions to comply with these appeals, as can be expected from a functional point of view. Overall, these findings put the focus squarely on the imperative dimension of emotional expressions and lend support to the view that emotional communication entails an attempt to influence recipients rather than simply to inform them about how expressers feel or what they may do next. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Tell me who you are and I tell you how you feel: expected emotional reactions to success and failure are influenced by knowledge about a person's personality.

The present research investigated the influence of knowledge about a person's modesty or arrogance on people's expectations regarding that person's emotional reactions to success and failure. Arrogance and modesty reflect the extent to which someone is likely to publicize their ability. Accordingly, we predicted that observers' expectations regarding a person's tendency to publicize their ability should inform expectations about the person's emotional reactions to success and failure. In two vignette studies, observers predicted the emotional state of a protagonist, as well as the probability that s/he will actually express that emotion and share the experience with others. For success, participants predicted a protagonist's pride, happiness, schadenfreude, and embarrassment if praised for a positive outcome. For failure, participants predicted anger, shame, guilt, sadness, and fear reactions. Across studies, personality information explained more variance than did gender or status. Results showed that the expectations for an arrogant person matched modal expectations for success, whereas for failure the expectations for the modest individual were closest to the modal expectations. Specifically, both modest and arrogant individuals were expected to suppress emotions that do not fit their self-presentational styles rather than to exaggerate expressions that do. This paper adds to our understanding of the information that people use to predict others' emotional reactions.

Does It Pay to Treat Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019? Social Perception of Physicians Treating Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the public has often expressed great appreciation toward medical personnel who were often shown in the media expressing strong emotions about the situation. To examine whether the perception of people on a physician is in fact influenced by whether the physician treats patients with COVID-19 and the emotions they expressed in response to the situation, 454 participants were recruited in May 2020. Participants saw facial expressions of anger, sadness, happiness, and neutrality which supposedly were shown by physicians who were presented as working either in COVID-19 wards or in an internal medicine ward. Participants rated how competent, empathetic, caring, and likable each physician was, to what degree they would wish to be treated by each physician, and what salary each physician deserved. Physicians treating patients with COVID-19 were seen more positively and as deserving higher pay; they appeared more competent, caring, likable, and were more likely to be chosen as a caregiver compared to physicians not treating patients with COVID-19. The expressed emotions of physicians had a strong impact on how they were perceived, yet this effect was largely unrelated to whether they treated patients with COVID-19 or not such that happy physicians seemed more empathetic, caring, and likable than the physicians who showed negative emotions. Positive regard toward physicians treating patients with COVID-19 was associated with the fact that they were seen as saving lives and not due to the risk imposed by their work.

Social Perception of Risk-Taking Willingness as a Function of Expressions of Emotions.

Two studies showed that emotion expressions serve as cues to the expresser's willingness to take risks in general, as well as in five risk domains (ethical, financial, health and safety, recreational, and social). Emotion expressions did not have a uniform effect on risk estimates across risk domains. Rather, these effects fit behavioral intentions associated with each emotion. Thus, anger expressions were related to ethical and social risks. Sadness reduced perceived willingness to take financial (Study 1 only), recreational, and social risks. Happiness reduced perceived willingness to take ethical and health/safety risks relative to neutrality. Disgust expressions increased the perceived likelihood of taking a social risk. Finally, neutrality increased the perceived willingness to engage in risky behavior in general. Overall, these results suggest that observers use their naïve understanding of the meaning of emotions to infer how likely an expresser is to engage in risky behavior.

What Emotion Facial Expressions Tell Us About the Health of Others.

To avoid contagion, we need information about the health status of those whom we engage with. This is especially important when we have cause for concern that the other is indeed sick, such as is the case during the world-wide outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020. In three studies, one conducted several years before the pandemic, and two during the pandemic, we showed that facial expressions of emotions are used as signals of health status. Specifically, happy expressers are perceived as healthier than expressers showing negative emotions or neutrality (Studies 1-3), whereas anger was interpreted as a signal of ill health (Study 3). Importantly, however, facial expressions affected health perception only when there was a prior reason to suspect ill health. This was the case for older expressers before and after the pandemic for whom age-related stereotypes set expectations of ill health and for all ages during a wide-spread pandemic, which extends this suspicion to everyone. In Study 3, we showed that the effect of emotion expressions was also generalized to the physical distance that the observer wishes to keep from the expresser. Overall, this research is the first to show a role of emotion expressions in informing health perception.

Emotional versus neutral expressions and perceptions of social dominance and submissiveness.

Emotional expressions influence social judgments of personality traits. The goal of the present research was to show that it is of interest to assess the impact of neutral expressions in this context. In 2 studies using different methodologies, the authors found that participants perceived men who expressed neutral and angry emotions as higher in dominance when compared with men expressing sadness or shame. Study 1 showed that this is also true for men expressing happiness. In contrast, women expressing either anger or happiness were perceived as higher in dominance than were women showing a neutral expression who were rated as less dominant. However, sadness expressions by both men and women clearly decreased the extent to which they were perceived as dominant, and a trend in this direction emerged for shame expressions by men in Study 2. Thus, neutral expressions seem to be perceived as a sign of dominance in men but not in women. The present findings extend our understanding of the way different emotional expressions affect perceived dominance and the signal function of neutral expressions-which in the past have often been ignored.

Drawing inferences from emotion expressions: The role of situative informativeness and context.

How people react emotionally to an event can tell us much about the event itself. However, emotions vary in their situative informativeness, that is, in how much information about the situation they provide. We predicted that when emotions are shown that are low in situative informativeness participants rely more on context information, then when the emotions shown are high in situative informativeness. This hypothesis was tested in 2 studies in which participants were asked to evaluate the quality of a player's performance based on the emotional reactions of spectators to an unknown ball game. Spectators reacted either with awe (high in situative informativeness), or with happiness or neutrality (low in situative informativeness). Participant also received context information. The findings supported the predictions and illustrate how emotions and context interact to inform us about events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

BCG and IL - 2 model for bladder cancer treatment with fast and slow dynamics based on SPVF method-stability analysis.

In this study, we apply the method of singularly perturbed vector field (SPVF) and its application to the problem of bladder cancer treatment that takes into account the combination of Bacillus CalmetteGurin vaccine (BCG) and interleukin (IL)-2 immunotherapy (IL - 2). The model is presented with a hidden hierarchy of time scale of the dynamical variables of the system. By applying the SPVF, we transform the model to SPS (Singular Perturbed System) form with explicit hierarchy, i.e., slow and fast sub-systems. The decomposition of the model to fast and slow subsystems, first of all, reduces significantly the time computer calculations as well as the long and complex algebraic expressions when investigating the full model. In addition, this decomposition allows us to explore only the fast subsystem without losing important biological/ mathematical information of the original system.The main results of the paper were that we obtained explicit expressions of the equilibrium points of the model and investigated the stability of these points.

Dyadic Dynamics: The Impact of Emotional Responses to Facial Expressions on the Perception of Power.

Emotion expressions play a central role in social communication, which, by definition is a dynamic process. Social communication involves the exchange of signals with temporal dynamic properties between two or more individuals. Nonetheless, emotion perception research has strongly focused on the study of single, static, unidirectional images. The goal of this research is to illustrate the dynamic nature of emotion communication by showing how the back and forth of a dyadic emotional interaction affects its perception by uninvolved observers. To that aim, we conducted three studies that investigated how observer's inferences of social power are influenced by an exchange of emotions between members of a dyad. In Study 1, participants saw one person showing either anger or sadness to which the second member of the dyad reacted by showing either anger, fear or neutrality. In Study 1, only still photos were shown in sequence. In Studies 2 and 3, more dynamic stimuli and other emotions were included. Even though an angry expresser was always perceived as more powerful than a sad expresser, the emotional reactions of the interaction partner modulated perceived power. Across all three studies and different levels of dynamic stimuli, fear reactions always increased perceived power. Happiness, contempt and neutrality affected perceived power more selectively. This effect was mediated by the extent to which participants felt that the reaction of the second interaction partner suggested that the second interaction partner agreed with regard to the power differential between the two. Taken together, these experiments show that the social signal value of emotion expressions changes meaningfully as a function of the emotional response of the expressions' target. Thus, the social signal value of emotions does not stand alone but has to be understood in the fuller context of the interaction.

Factors in the doctor-patient relationship that accentuate physicians' hurt feelings when patients terminate the relationship with them.

OBJECTIVE: The present study explores the emotional effect of the injury experienced by physician's, as a consequence of a patient's termination of their relationship. METHODS: A vignette study using different scenarios describing a patient who switched to another doctor was distributed to 119 family physicians. A three-way ANCOVA analysis was employed. Additionally, physicians' answered an open question asking of situations that elicited negative emotions. RESULTS: The quantitative results indicated that termination of the relationship by a "high status" patient and/or after a long duration is more emotionally hurtful than termination by a "lower status" patient after a brief relationship. The results of the open question provided an additional insight into the emotional impact of the doctor's hurt feelings on the doctor-patient relationship. CONCLUSIONS: The severity and consequences of the emotional injury experienced by physicians when patients decide to transfer to another physician are influenced by factors related to the patient, physician and the relationship between them. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: We discuss the implications of our results on the understanding of the emotional injury and consequent impaired function and possible "burn-out" in physicians and explore the possibility of educating doctors to heightened awareness and consequently enhanced ability to cope with such situations.