Dear All, I'm looking for a literature on social perception on ambiguous facial expression. I have a feeling that there's not many on this – except perception of displayed emotion and the influence of the context and individual differences (e.g. anxiety). However, what I’m looking for is how people interpreted the meaning of ambiguous emotional expression during social interaction (e.g. what are displayer’s intention or action request?). Secondly, do you know any literature showing that negative/angry display might be less readable than positive displays in terms of displayer’s intention and action request? There’s a lot of literature that show influence of culture/social norms on facial expression during social interaction, e.g. western cultures are less likely to show anger to strangers (cause it might be acknowledge as impolite). So, during social interaction we should rather expect stranger to smile than to frown. Consequently, if someone is smiling it is natural that he/she’s trying to be nice, on the other hand if he/she’s showing anger, there might be a lot of reasons for such a behavior and his/her intention remain unclear… I don’t know whether you’d support my way of thinking, but if you do, and additionally have some research on this, please let me know! :-) I’d appreciate your help! Michal -- ********** Michal Olszanowski, PhD. Warsaw School of Social Sciences & Humanities Faculty of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Department Chodakowska Street 19/31, PL - 03815 Warsaw www.swps.pl, www.emotional-face.org