LOOKING AND SPEAKING THE PART: EFFECTS OF INCONGRUENCE BETWEEN NEGOTIATORS’ FACIALLY- AND VERBALLY EXPRESSED EMOTIONS

Abstract: Existing research suggests that during a negotiation, parties continually notice and process each other’s emotions, judging each other and weighing statements appropriately. In this preliminary investigation, we examine the effects of incongruence between negotiators’ facially- and verbally-expressed emotion on the attributions negotiators form of each other and on the joint value of their negotiated integrative solution. We collected data from 17 MBA dyads in a negotiation course. Dyads negotiated a multi-issue integrative exercise via Zoom. We measured facial emotion from video using FaceReader (see Stephens et al., 2019) and verbal emotion from transcripts with LIWC (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010). Results indicate that the deviation between negotiators’ facial and verbal emotion was significantly negatively associated with their counterparts’ perceptions of their believability, but positively associated with perceptions of their convincingness. The difference in the amount of verbally-expressed sadness between the negotiators was positively related to the joint value of their negotiated solution.

Keywords: facially expressed emotion, verbally expressed emotion