Would you Trust Someone Who’s Angry? Expressed Emotion and Trust

In contrast to prior work that has found that negative affect harms trust, we demonstrate that in some contexts negative affect can boost trust. We focus on affective expressions and explore the reverse inference process. We find that contextual cues, including ex-post reasons, significantly moderate the influence of affective expressions on trust. Specifically, we find that negative affective expressions can boost trust relative to neutral affective expressions—as long as the context or reason is congruent with the negative expression. We identify judgments of appropriateness as an important mediating mechanism of this relationship, and we find that expressers can directly influence observers’ judgments of appropriateness. Our findings deepen our understanding of the relationships among emotion, cognition, and trust, and highlight the importance of accounting for explanations and affective context in emotion research.