One's own emotions may influence someone else's behavior in a social interaction. If one believes this, s/he has an incentive to game emotions-to strategically modify the expression of a current emotional state-in an attempt to influence her/his counterpart. In a series of three experiments,...

People often do not realize they are being influenced by an incidental emotional state. As a result, decisions based on a fleeting incidental emotion can become the basis for future decisions and hence outlive the original cause for the behavior (i.e., the emotion itself). Using a sequence of...