Fantine Xiao

Trust requires engaging with uncertainty about others’ reciprocity. Emotional communication may shape how people perceive and evaluate this uncertainty, yet many social environments constrain emotional expression. This paper examines whether communicating anticipated feelings affects willingness to trust. It considers three channels using the incentivized belief hedge method: belief, ambiguity aversion, and ambiguity-generated insensitivity. In a preregistered modified trust game, 350 U.S.-based Prolific participants are randomly assigned to one of four conditions: no message, happy message, disappointed message, or a choice between the two. Overall, emotional communication modestly increases expected returns but does not significantly affect trust or actual returns. Its effects on attitudes vary by emotion: happiness message increases ambiguity seeking, while disappointment message reduces a-insensitivity. These findings show that structured anticipated-emotion messages reshape how people perceive and evaluate uncertainty surrounding trust.

Emotional expressions in negotiation, such as anger expressions, can influence strategic behavior, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This paper develops a structural behavioral framework and uses an online experiment (N = 800) with a 2 × 2 between-subjects design varying the counterpart's anger expression and gender. We find that anger expressions have no significant overall effect on final offers because they reduce altruism while increasing beliefs about the counterpart's reservation price, with these two channels largely offsetting each other. Anger expressions also reduce perceived social ambiguity, especially when expressed by male counterparts, suggesting that male anger expressions are perceived as more diagnostic signals in negotiation.