This chapter discusses how and why emotions affect other people’s actions, appraisals and emotions. One popular explanation of interpersonal influence is primitive emotional contagion. According to this account, people arrive at similar emotional states because they copy one another’s gestures and expressions (mimicry). The feelings and sensations produced by these gestures and expressions then produce convergent emotional experiences (interoceptive feedback). However, mimicry effects are too selective and feedback effects too weak to make this process work consistently. An alternative process is social appraisal, which involves calibrating emotional orientations to objects or events in the shared environment. Most studies of social appraisal present participants with verbal or facial information about someone else’s emotion and assess their inferences about that information. However, relation alignment may also operate at a more implicit level when people adjust to each other’s developing object-directed signals and movements. Similar processes may also produce divergent or conflicting emotional orientations when two people approach the same event from different angles or interpret its consequences in different ways.

This concluding chapter summarises ideas and evidence presented earlier in the book and sets out the general principles of the relation-alignment approach to emotional influence. I develop the argument that emotions are embodied orientations to objects, events or people that converge or conflict with other people’s orientations, rather than internal mental states that only make indirect contact with the social world. Their effects and functions depend crucially on the dynamic interpersonal, intergroup, organisational and societal systems within which they operate. Emotion’s range of social influence extends cumulatively over the course of socialisation, as caregivers deliver culturally informed responses to children’s increasingly articulated orientations. The capacity to use words and faces in symbolically mediated pragmatic communications ultimately permits conventionalised forms of social influence that are less constrained by immediately pressing situational concerns, facilitating more strategic forms of interpersonal regulation. However, even fully socialised adults remain susceptible to less explicit forms of emotional influence, and do not necessarily register the meaning of the emotional operations shaping their own dynamic responses. Thus, our emotions affect other people in a variety of ways, none of which depend directly on the mediated transmission of private meanings. People learn to keep their emotional inclinations to themselves only after becoming sensitive to their prior social effects.

Interpersonally presented emotions help to calibrate people’s orientations to things happening in the shared environment. For example, social referencing involves one person seeking clarification of the appropriate appraisal of an object, event, or person, and another person responding with an emotional orientation that disambiguates things. However, this paradigmatic case represents only one of the possible ways in which emotions affect other people’s physical or mental attitudes. In other cases, emotion-related responses affect other people’s orientations independent of their explicit informational content. Further, emotional knowledge may be co-constructed dynamically rather than transmitted unidirectionally from one person to another. In these cases, affective social learning need not involve changes in the perceived meaning of emotional objects, but rather adjustments in interactants’ orientations to what is happening. This chapter suggests ways of extending and going beyond existing methodological and theoretical approaches to emotional influence and identifies some of the blindspots of previous research.

Interpersonally presented emotions help to calibrate people’s orientations to things happening in the shared environment. For example, social referencing involves one person seeking clarification of the appropriate appraisal of an object, event, or person, and another person responding with an emotional orientation that disambiguates things. However, this paradigmatic case represents only one of the possible ways in which emotions affect other people’s physical or mental attitudes. In other cases, emotion-related responses affect other people’s orientations independent of their explicit informational content. Further, emotional knowledge may be co-constructed dynamically rather than transmitted unidirectionally from one person to another. In these cases, affective social learning need not involve changes in the perceived meaning of emotional objects, but rather adjustments in interactants’ orientations to what is happening. This chapter suggests ways of extending and going beyond existing methodological and theoretical approaches to emotional influence and identifies some of the blindspots of previous research.