Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleave

Emotions are automatically expressed, automatically detected, and provide a glimpse into an individual's personality and motivations. Based on this, we hypothesized that providing individuals with information about a target's emotional state would increase the extent to which those individuals felt they had learned something about the target's personality. We tested this hypothesis in 2 studies. Study 1 showed that adding emotional information to an account of a target's action increased perceived learning about that target's personality. Study 2 showed that this effect was due to the emotional nature of the added information and not merely to increased sentence length. These results suggest that emotions serve to convey information about inner states to others, and that individuals use this information when forming dispositional judgments.