People do not always show how they feel. Emotional expressions are often influenced by social norms from one’s environment – also known as display rules. While positive emotions are known to have generally weaker display rules that negative emotions, should we then expect all ‘feel good’ states to be equally acceptable to express?

In a series of empirical studies, AICE researchers Kunalan Manokara, Agneta Fischer, and Disa Sauter demonstrated that display rules differ even between multiple positive emotions. In so doing, they provided the first map of expression norms for eight specific positive emotions. The paper was published in Emotion, and the abstract is as follows:

“People do not always show how they feel; norms often dictate when to display emotions and to whom. Norms about emotional expressions—known as display rules—are weaker for happiness than for negative emotions, suggesting that expressing positive emotions is generally seen as acceptable. But does it follow that all positive emotions can always be shown to everyone? To answer this question, we mapped out context-specific display rules for 8 positive emotions: gratitude, admiration, interest, relief, amusement, feeling moved, sensory pleasure, and triumph. In four studies with participants from five countries (n = 1,181), two consistent findings emerged. First, display rules differed between positive emotions. Weaker display rules were found for gratitude, interest, and amusement, whereas stronger display rules were found for sensory pleasure, feeling moved, and to some degree triumph. Second, contextual features — such as expresser location and perceiver relationship — both substantially influenced display rules for positive emotions, with perceiver relationship having a greater impact on display rules than expresser location. Our findings demonstrate that some positive emotions are less acceptable to express than others and highlight the central role of context in influencing display rules even for emotions that feel good. In so doing, we provide the first map of expression norms for specific positive emotions.”

Link to the paper