The emotional responses toinquiry and advocacy in human interactions
Ilkka Leppänen a,c,d
Raimo P. Hämäläinen a
Esa Saarinen b
Mikko Viinikainen a
aSystems Analysis Laboratory, Aalto University, P.O. Box 11100, 00076 Aalto, Finland, E-mails: , , .
bDepartment of Industrial Engineering and Management, Aalto University, P.O. Box 15500, 00076 Aalto, Finland, E-mail: .
cCorresponding author, E-mail: , Tel: 358 50 432 3591, Fax: 358 9 863 2048.
d Present address: School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, United Kingdom.
August 25, 2016
The emotional responses toinquiry and advocacy in human interactions
Abstract
The role oftwo interaction modes, inquiry and advocacy, have been of interest in organizational studies.Inquiry refers to an interested and explorative interaction mode, and advocacy to an assertive and narrow mode. Balancing these modes has been found to be an effective way to improve communication. However the emotional responses tothe inquiry and advocacy modes remain yet unexplored.We studied the emotional responses to inquiry and advocacy by facial electromyography and skin conductance response. Subjects were promptedto adopt the different modes in hypothetical encounters with other persons. We found that Duchenne smiles were specific to the inquiry mode and furrowed brows were specific to the advocacy mode. Subjects with a high empathy scoreexpressed more Duchenne smiles than those with a low empathy score. The results highlight that genuine positive emotional expressions are related to the inquiry mode and negative emotional expressions to the advocacy mode.
Keywords: emotions;inquiry;advocacy;electromyography;skin conductance response
Introduction
This paper reports the results of an experimental study ofthe emotional responses totwo interaction modes, inquiry and advocacy. A person with an inquiry mode shows interest in the other’s points of views and asks questions and explores different possibilities. A person with an advocacy mode approaches others with a narrow and assertive way and emphasizes her own points of view. Inquiry and advocacy have received interest in the organizational learning literature (Argyris Schön, 1978; Senge, 1990).This literature emphasizes the systems perspective in understanding and improving the performance of organizations. More recently the concept of systems intelligence was introduced by Hämäläinen and Saarinen (2004). The construct was shown to have eight factors one of which is attunement (Törmänen et al., 2016). This reflects the way we interact with people. Inquiry and advocacy reflect the ways people attune to each other and thus our experiment can be seen as a way to measure the level of the attunement factor of systems intelligence used in the interaction.
Inquiry and advocacy have also received interest as ways to introduce cognitive conflict into an organizational decision making process (Schweiger, Sandberg, & Ragan, 1986). Evidence from laboratory experiments shows that introducing and balancing inquiry and advocacy in the decision making process improves decisions over a simple process where only expert recommendations are followed and no conflict between the decision makers is present (Schwenk, 1990). Little is known about how interpersonalcharacteristics of the decision makers affect the efficacy of theinquiry and advocacy modes, a point emphasized by Schwenk(1990).Human interactions even in structured contextsthat are thought to be cognitive in nature often involve emotions. Emotions are particularly important in studying face-to-face interactions because factors such as nonverbal signs and speech intonation are so often used to express emotion (Martinovsky, 2015).
Positive emotion expressions are known toincrease cooperativeness and reduce conflict and lead to better outcomes than negative emotions (Barsade 2002; Kopelman, RosetteThompson, 2006; Hine et al., 2009) and carry informational value in decisions despite being seemingly irrelevant (Steffen, Rockstroh Jansma, 2008). Negative emotion expressions such as anger cause more concessions(Sinaceur Tiedens, 2006; Van Kleef, De Dreu Manstead,2004) as well as an anger response in the opponent(Friedman et al., 2004), but experienced angermay be counterproductive (Allred et al., 1997).Positive and negative emotions affect differently on cognition: Whereas negative emotions narrow attention and bias it against threats (Frijda, 1994), positive emotions broaden attention and increase cognitive flexibility (Fredrickson, 2001), promote in-group identity (Johnson Fredrickson, 2005), andmay lead to different information processing strategies than negative emotions (Forgas George, 2001).
Despite of the extensive interest in emotions in human interactions, previous research has notstudied theemotional responses to inquiry and advocacy.At first thought one might assume that the advocacy mode only incorporates negative emotions and the inquiry mode positive emotions. However, this is a too simplistic view. For example, it is possible that afraudulentperson expresses non-genuine positive emotions in advocacy, or that a personin an inquiry mode gets frustrated at the interaction process and experiences negative emotions. It may also be that neither of the modes generates changes in the internal emotional state of the person.
To explore the emotionalresponses toinquiry and advocacy, we studied experimentally how facial expressions of emotions and the activation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) relate to the two modes.Subjects were prompted to adopt an inquiry mode, an advocacy mode, and a passive (neutral)viewing mode in simulatedencounters with other personswho wererepresented by facial picturesaccompanied bystatements. We then measured emotions in the alternative modes in a within-subject design. To distinguish genuine positive emotional expressions from non-genuine ones, we measured both the Duchenne and the non-Duchenne smiles. The Duchenne smile is often associated with positively valenced stimuli and it is formed by contracting both the zygomaticus major and the orbicularis oculi muscles, whereas the non-Duchenne smile involves only the zygomaticus major(Ekman, Davidson Friesen, 1990; Frank Ekman, 1993). The negative emotional expressions were represented by furrowed brows where thecorrugator supercilii muscle is contracted. The furrowed brows expression is often associated with negatively valenced stimuli (Larsen, Norris Cacioppo, 2003). These facial expressions were measured by facial electromyography (EMG). Activation of the sympathetic part of the ANS, emotional arousal, was measured by the skin conductance response (SCR). To include somatic responsivity as a control variable in the analysis we formed an empathy score for each subject with a 33-item self-report questionnaire.
We study four specific hypotheses concerning the emotional responses to the two interaction modes:
(1) Inquiry and advocacy generate different emotional expressions: inquirygenerates Duchenne smiles and advocacy generates furrowed brows.
(2a) Inquiry generates more Duchennes than non-Duchennes.
(2b) Advocacy generates less Duchennes than non-Duchennes.
(3) Inquiry and advocacy elicit different amounts of emotional arousal, and the level of arousal correlates differently with different emotional expressions.[1]
(4) Subjects who have ahigher empathy score are more expressive than subjects who have a lower empathy score.
Method
Procedure
During the experiment the subjects sat still in a dimly lit room and underwent three treatments: Inquiry, advocacy, and passive. The stimuli were the same in each treatment and consisted of a set of 26 facial photographs with written statementsbelow the photograph. The statements represented the opinion of the person in the photograph on a topic which varied from person to person. Examples of statements included: ‘I am terrified of gene manipulated food’ and ‘Shopping makes me happy’.The subjects were instructed to silently take either an inquiry approach (inquiry treatment) or an advocacy approach (advocacy treatment) to the stimuli, or to observe the stimulipassively (passive treatment). The photographs, statements, and the experimental instructions are available in the Supplemental Material.
Each photograph was shown for 18 s with 5-s breaks. The same set of photographs was shown in each treatment in randomized order. The passive treatment was always the final treatment whereas the order of the inquiry and advocacy treatments was randomized between the subjects. A 5-min baseline was measured at the beginning.
Measurements
The EMG and SCR data were obtained using bipolar Ag/AgCl electrodes. The measurements were conducted with Nexus-4 equipment and recorded with BioTrace+ software (MindMedia B.V., The Netherlands).The EMG data was obtained from the corrugator supercilii, zygomaticus major, and orbicularis oculi facial muscle sites at the left hemisphere of the face. The placements of the EMG electrodes followed the recommendations of Fridlund and Cacioppo (1986). The SCR data was obtained from the non-dominant hand index and middle fingers.
The 2048-Hz EMG data was band pass filtered between 90 Hz and 200 Hz, smoothed, rectified and logarithmized. The EMG scores were obtained with a similar procedure as used by Johnson, Waugh and Fredrickson (2010). The signal during the 18-s stimuli was averaged into 3-s bins, the mean from the60-s baseline signal was subtracted from each bin, and each bin was coded active for a positive remainder. A Duchenne smile was registered if both the zygomaticus major and the orbicularis oculi were active but the corrugator supercilii inactive. A non-Duchenne smile was registered if only the zygomaticus major was active. A furrowed brow was registered if only the corrugator supercilii was active. Each EMG score therefore has a count value 0 to 6. The 128-Hz SCR data was deconvoluted into an integrated SCR (ISCR) score (Benedek Kaernbach, 2010) and logarithmized. The ISCR score has unit μSs.
Before the measurement began the subjects filled a 33-item questionnaire measuring empathy (Mehrabian Epstein, 1972, p. 528).An empathy score 0‒100 was calculated from the responses.
Participants
A total of 40 healthy subjects participated. After the experiment the subjectsreported in writing what they had thought during the inquiry and advocacy treatments. The reports were used to decide which subjects did not understand the task and should be excluded from further analysis. Three outsideobserverswho did not know anything about the goals of the experiment read the reports and decided which subjects should be excluded.Seven subjects were excluded. The remaining number of subjects was 33 (Mage = 34.6 years, age range: 22−61 years, 17 women).
Compliance with ethical standards
All subjects gave their written consent on participating in the experiment. The experiment was approved by the ethics committee of [masked university name] and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.
Results
The results were analyzed using linear mixed models (LMMs) where the subjects were treated as random effects. This takes the between-subject heterogeneity in the psychophysiological measurements into account.The degrees of freedom were calculated by Satterthwaite approximations. We report theSD of random effects as σ0 (residual) and σ1 (slope).
Figure1 shows the main results. There were moreboth Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles in the inquiry treatment than in the passive treatment. Thus, the inquiry treatment generated both genuine and non-genuine positive emotional expressions.The number of Duchenne smiles was not differentbetween the advocacy and passive treatments.However, the number of non-Duchenne smileswas higher in the advocacy treatment than in the passive treatment. Thus, thegenuine positive emotional expressions were above the passive treatment numbers only in the inquiry treatment, whereas the non-genuine positive emotional expressions were above the passive treatmentnumbers in both the inquiry and the advocacy treatments. Furthermore, the mean bin count of the Duchenne smiles was significantly greater than the mean bin count of the non-Duchenne smiles in the inquiry treatment (one-sided paired t-test, t = 8.79, 831 df,p < .001).
[Figure 1 near here]
The comparison of the mean numbers of non-Duchenne smile bin counts between treatments in Figure1 raises an additional question: Did the advocacy treatment have a higher number ofnon-Duchenne smiles than the inquiry treatment? An LMM with a focused contrast between the advocacy and inquiry treatments indicated that this difference was not significant (LMM, slope coefficient −0.01, SEM = .03, t = −0.26, 1632 df, p = .79, σ0 = 0.56 and σ1 = 0.81).
There were a higher number of furrowed brows in the advocacy treatment than in the passive treatment and a lower number of furrowed brows in the inquiry treatment than in the passive treatment (Figure 1).In other words, the furrowed brows expression was activated in the advocacy treatment and inhibited in the inquiry treatment. This suggeststhat there was a treatment-specific inverse relationship between furrowed brows and the Duchenne smiles.We also studied the relationship between the bin counts of the furrowed brows expressions and the Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles. This revealed that the furrowed brows bin count at each stimuli was indeed inversely related to the bin counts of the two smiles (LMM, Duchenne coefficient −0.27, t= −8.53, 2487.6 df,p < .001, non-Duchenne coefficient −0.31, t= −5.97, 2495.1 df,p < .001, σ0 = 1.69 and σ1 = 1.52).
Figure 1shows that there was more emotional arousal in both the inquiry and advocacy treatments than in the passive treatment.Mean ISCR was 0.27 log μSs (SEM = 0.04) higher in the inquiry treatment than in the advocacy treatment (LMM with a focused contrast between the advocacy and inquiry treatments, t = 6.9, 1377 df,p .001, σ0 = 0.72 and σ1 = 0.5).
How did the different emotional expressions moderate the treatment effect of emotional arousal?Table 1 shows results from an LMM where emotional arousal is the dependent variable and the emotional expressions are the independent variables andthe treatments are included as interaction effects. Only the non-Duchenne smiles were differently related to emotional arousal in the inquiry and advocacy treatments. This treatment interaction effect was positive in the inquiry treatment and negative in the advocacy treatment. In other words, arousal increased in the bin count of non-Duchenne smiles in the inquiry treatment, but in the advocacy treatment arousal decreased in the bin count of non-Duchenne smiles. The relationship between emotional arousal and the Duchenne smile was constant and increasing across all the treatments.The relationship between emotional arousal and furrowed brows was constant and decreasing across all the treatments, albeit only at a marginal significance level (p = .07).
[Table 1 near here]
The mean empathy score was 43.4 (SD = 23.7). Table 2 shows results from LMMs where each emotional expression and emotional arousal were in turn the dependent variables and the empathy score was the independent variable and the treatments were included as interaction effects. Empathy correlated with all the EMG bin counts as well as withthe arousal score in the inquiry treatment, but in the advocacy treatment empathy correlated only with the non-Duchenne smile.With the Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles this treatment effect was increasing, i.e. in the inquiry treatment subjects with a higher empathy score expresseda higher number ofpositive emotional expressions than subjects with a lower empathy score. With the furrowed brows expression this treatment effect was decreasing, i.e. in the inquiry treatment subjects with a higher empathy score expresseda smaller number ofnegative emotional expressions than subjects with a lower empathy score.With arousal the treatment effect was increasing but again only in the inquiry treatment.
[Table 2 near here]
Discussion
Our results showthat positive emotional expressionsare specific to the inquiry mode and negative emotional expressions are specific to the advocacy mode. Hypothesis 1 is therefore supported. It is likely that people express both Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles in interactions with other people. For this reason we used amethodthat distinguished the Duchenne smiles from the non-Duchenne smiles.The non-genuine smiles are more likely to be related to masked or feigned emotions than the genuine smiles. Previous literature has also found that the non-genuine smiles are expressed when experiencing negative emotionsor in situations of deception (e.g. Ekman, Friesen O’Sullivan, 1988). In our experiment the Duchenne smileswere only present in the inquiry mode whereas the non-Duchenne smiles were present in both inquiry and advocacy modes -- supporting Hypothesis 2a but not Hypothesis 2b. Our results on the specificity of facially expressed emotions are consistent withother experiments reporting the differential activation of genuine and non-genuine smiles on positively and negatively valenced stimuli (Ekman, DavidsonFriesen, 1990; Johnson, Waugh Fredrickson,2010; for opposing evidencesee also Krumhuber Manstead, 2009). Related findings in the literature include the use of Duchenne smiles in persuasion (Gunnery Hall, 2014), as social reinforcers (Shore Heerey, 2011), and as honest signals of cooperation in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game (Reed, Zeglen Schmidt, 2012).
The negative emotional expression, the furrowed brows, was elevated in the advocacy mode and inhibited in the inquiry mode with respect to passive viewing. Thispattern is known from previous research concerning the neurophysiology of the corrugator supercilii, where its activation is reciprocal to negative and positive valence and antagonistic to the zygomaticus major(Dimberg Lundquist, 1990) or otherwiserestricted in specific positive emotion stimuli (Heckmann et al., 2003). The inhibition of furrowed brows and activation of the Duchenne and the non-Duchenne smiles during the same stimuli reveals that the inquiry mode did not only include the use of the smiles but also expressions where control of the brow musculature played a role.Particularly notable is that thecorrugator supercilii activity was significantly lower in the inquiry treatment than in the passive treatment. This may represent volitional inhibition of the furrowed brows expression in the inquiry treatment (see also Kappas, Bherer Thériault, 2000).