Emotional signaling in a social dilemma: An automatic analysis

Emotional signaling plays an important role in negotiations and other social decision-making tasks as it can signal intention and shape joint decisions. Specifically it has been shown to influence cooperation or competition. This has been shown in previous studies for scripted interactions that control emotion signaling and rely on manual coding of affect. In this work we examine face-to-face interactions in an iterative social dilemma task (prisoner's dilemma) via an automatic framework for facial expression analysis. We explore if automatic analysis of emotion can give insight into the social function of emotion in face-to-face interactions. Our analysis suggests that positive and negative displays of emotion are associated with more prosocial and proself game acts respectively. Moreover signaling cooperative intentions to the opponent via positivity can leave participants more open to exploitation, whereas signaling a more tough stance via negativity seems to discourage exploitation. However, the benefit of negative affect is short-term and both players do worse over time if they show negative emotions.