Positive emotions are implicated in affiliation and cooperation processes that are central to human social life. For this reason, we hypothesized that people should be highly aware of and responsive to the positive emotions of others. Study 1 examined awareness by testing the accuracy with which perceivers tracked others’ positive emotions. Study 2 examined responsiveness by testing whether pos...

Human emotion is typically studied as a within-person, one-direction, non-repetitive phenomenon; focus has traditionally been on how one individual feels in reaction to various stimuli at a certain point of time. But people recognize and inevitably react emotionally and otherwise to expressions of emotion of other people. We propose that organizational dyads and groups inhabit emotion cycles: E...

Successful social interactions depend on people's ability to predict others' future actions and emotions. People possess many mechanisms for perceiving others' current emotional states, but how might they use this information to predict others' future states? We hypothesized that people might capitalize on an overlooked aspect of affective experience: current emotions predict future emotions. B...