Zi Ye

Our beliefs about others’ emotional expressions are shaped by social identities such as race, gender, and occupation, but does social class also matter? Given rising economic disparities and frequent cross-class interactions, understanding class-based emotion beliefs is critical. We investigated beliefs about others’ emotional expressions in relation to targets’ social class, focusing on two types of positive emotions: self-oriented (e.g. pride) and other-oriented (e.g. gratitude). Across three studies conducted in the UK (Study 1, n = 200, pre-registered), India and UAE (Studies 2a and 2b, total n = 565, exploratory), and the US (Study 3, n = 1,616, pre-registered), higher-class targets were believed as more likely to express self-oriented positive emotions, whereas lower-class targets were more likely to express other-oriented positive emotions. We then examined the consequences of these emotion beliefs (Study 4a, n = 426, exploratory; Study 4b, n = 832, pre-registered), finding that stereotype congruence mediated the joint effect of target social class and emotion type, such that people were more willing to associate with and work in teams with targets whose emotional expressions aligned with expectations. These findings first highlight the cross-cultural consistency of these beliefs, and next point to the behavioural intentions that stem from emotion stereotypes.

Research has shown that negotiators sometimes misrepresent their emotions, and communicate a different emotion to opponents than they actually experience. Less is known about how people evaluate such negotiation tactics. Building on person perception literature, we investigated in three preregistered studies (N = 853) how participants evaluate negotiators who deceptively (vs. genuinely) communicate anger or happiness, on the dimensions of morality, sociability, and competence. Study 1 employed a buyer/seller setting, Studies 2 and 3 employed an Ultimatum Bargaining Game (UBG). In all studies, participants learned a negotiator’s (the target’s) experienced and communicated emotions (anger or happiness), before evaluating the target. Across studies, targets were evaluated lower on morality if they deceptively (vs. genuinely) communicated anger or happiness. Notably, negotiators deceptively communicating anger were evaluated lower on morality and sociability but higher on competence than those deceptively communicating happiness. Studies 2 and 3 investigated behavioral consequences by examining whether in a future negotiation participants chose the target to be their opponent or representative. Results showed that for opponents, participants preferred targets who genuinely communicated happiness (vs. anger), which was associated with their perceived morality or sociability. For representatives, participants not only preferred targets who had genuinely communicated happiness (vs. anger), but also targets who had deceptively communicated anger (vs. happiness), which was associated with their perceived competence. These findings show that when evaluating deceptive (vs. genuine) communication strategies, people distinguish between morality, sociability, and competence. The importance they attach to these dimensions is also contingent on the behavioral decisions they face.

This paper addresses the adaptive asymptotic tracking control problem for nonlinear systems whose virtual control gains are unknown nonlinear functions of system states. Only in the first step, the Nussbaum gain technique is utilized to handle the uncertain virtual control gain. In the remaining steps, virtual control gains are dealt with by constructing novel control laws without the approximation of the uncertain nonlinear functions and external disturbances by neural networks or fuzzy logic. New adaptive laws are defined to compensate for unknown virtual control gains, uncertain parameters, and external disturbances. Finally, an adaptive tracking controller is designed and applied to the control of a 3-order robot system, which guarantees the boundedness of all the signals in the closed-loop system and asymptotic stability of the tracking error.