Abstract
Emotion theories highlight the fundamental function of emotional expressions in regulating social behavior. Yet, this basic premise relies mostly on studies using posed expressions that may fail to capture the diversity of real-life emotional signals and invite explicit affective inferences due to their salient symbolic nature. Across three studies (N=1,529), we tested how naturalistic emotional expressions differentially shape affective judgments and prosocial behavior. Participants watched videos of distressed individuals expressing typical crying, atypical crying, typical laughter, or no vocalization, and either inferred the targets’ affect (Study 1) or donated real money to help them from a provided budget (Study 2). Perceivers were sensitive to the vocal crying variation when explicitly inferring affect, but not when making donation decisions. Importantly, when perceivers explicitly inferred affect before donating (Study 3), they donated nearly 40% more and showed increased sensitivity to vocal cue variation. These findings suggest that inferring other people’s affect when making behavioral decisions is not routine and can facilitate helping behavior and the sensitivity to others’ emotional signals. This also highlight the important role of explicit inferential processes in linking real-life emotional expressions to prosocial behavior in everyday life.