Among social stimuli, the human face is unique. Its properties and features, both static and dynamic, reveal different aspects of a person. Perceivers use this information when they aim, for example, to recognize individuals, identify their social groups, discern their personality, detect their focus of attention, understand their verbal and non-verbal behaviours, and infer their emotions. Emotions that we read from facial actions are crucial to social interaction: They provide information that helps us understand social intentions, how to react to others, and to evaluate the affective meaning of many events that we encounter in our environment. In this chapter, we focus on social appraisal – one of the central mechanisms involved in affective social learning. In particular, we discuss the notion that, through a particular socio-affective inferential mechanism, social appraisal plays a significant role when the emotional expression of person A is used to learn about the value of the emotion expressed by person B. The first section of this chapter provides a brief historical introduction to the relation between contextual information and emotion recognition in faces. Then, we focus on the construct of social appraisal and its manifestation in socio-affective inferential mechanisms involved in emotion recognition. In the third section, we present empirical evidence supporting the automaticity of such socio-affective inferential mechanisms and discuss its implication for the theoretical framework of affective social learning. Next, we discuss the idea that ambiguous situations may be particularly prone to social appraisal taking place. Finally, we discuss how social appraisal, underpinned by a socio-affective inferential mechanism, may be integrated into the affective social learning framework.

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.