Emotional Signaling: How Helpers’ Emotional Expressions Affect Attributions of Motives, Relationship Quality, and Reciprocation

Research has shown that interpersonal helping offers many social benefits for the helper, yet these social benefits depend on the recipients’ responses. Whether helping is perceived favorably by recipients depends on the underlying motives they attribute to the helper, which raises the questions of when and how recipients may attribute different motives to helping. To explain when and how those receiving help make these attributions, we adopt a social-functional approach to emotions to examine the impact of the social information conveyed through discrete emotional expressions. We draw on the framework of emotions as social information to theorize that the helper’s emotional expressions act as signals of social engagement or disengagement that differentially impact the recipient’s attribution of motives and reactions to help. Across three studies, we find that helpers’ expressions of socially engaging emotions (gratitude and sympathy) lead to greater attributions of prosocial motives, whereas expressions of socially disengaging emotions (pride and contempt) lead to greater attributions of instrumental motives. We find that the effect of these expressed emotions on relationship quality and reciprocation toward the helper is mediated by the recipient’s attribution of prosocial motives but not by the attribution of instrumental motives.