Emotions encompass experiences, physical or psychological responses, and behavioral adjustments to particular events, occurrences, and activities. Emotions influence people’s behavior, actions, activities, and decisions because they affect how a person behaves in varying circumstances and responds to different events. Emotions and personality also affect people’s ability to negotiate, understand, or recognize others’ emotional expressions. The scholarly consensus regarding emotions was that they are universal and remain similar across different cultures and contexts. The scientific community argues that emotions remain constant across diverse regions or cultures and only change when people deliberately attempt to control their feelings. However, researcher Hillary Anger Elfenbein disrupted the longstanding view by introducing the dialect theory in 2002. The dialect theory asserts that although emotion is a universal language, it has different global dialects in cultures, similar to other widely-spoken languages.
Hillary Anger Elfenbein, known for her research on emotions and the Dialect Theory, is a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in Saint Louis. Elfenbein is also a stand-up comedian, apart from being a John and Ellen Wallace distinguished professor and researcher. Elfenbein studied variations in human emotions in the workplace, during negotiations, and across different cultures. However, the researcher also researched several ambiguous issues, including the effects of personality traits in negotiations and the relationship between expressing emotions and recognizing such expressions. Elfenbein has also been performing as a stand-up comedian on various platforms since 2016 under her stage name Hillary Anger. She was also one of the semifinalists in the Funniest Person Competition in St. Louis in 2019 and 2022.
The professor and researcher, born on March 2, 1972, in New York City to Harry and Carol Sylvia Anger, graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1989. Elfenbein went to Harvard for her undergraduate studies and received a degree in Physics and Sanskrit & Indian Studies in 1994. She started working as a management consultant at Monitor Company in Cambridge, where she worked until 1996, during which she took a leave of absence to work with nonprofit organizations engaged in public health and women’s rights in India. Elfenbein returned to Harvard in 1997 and completed a Masters in statistics and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior. She continued as a senior researcher at Harvard Business School until 2003 before assuming the role of assistant professor at the University of California, Berkley. She later accepted an Associate Professor with tenure position at Washington University in St. Louis, where she currently works as the John and Ellen Wallace distinguished professor.
Emotions and emotional expressions play a primary role in people’s behavior and interactions because they affect how people act or behave in particular situations, make decisions, and interact with others. The traditional school of thought regarding emotions implies that they remain constant across cultures and only change when people deliberately control or regulate their emotions regardless of the setting. However, Hillary Anger Elfenbein challenged and transformed this perception by showing that emotions resemble dialects in languages that vary with cultural or geographical changes. Her research shifted the focus from the universality and constancy of emotions to variability across cultures and contexts. She summarized over a decade of the work done on this topic by her and other scholars in her paper Nonverbal Dialects and Accents in Facial Expressions of Emotion, published in 2013 in the journal called Emotion Review, received recognition among scholars and has been cited by over 170 researchers.
Elfenbein achieved prominence in the research fraternity, especially in the organizational behavior and human emotions field, because of her role in developing the Dialect Theory. The Dialect Theory posits that emotions vary with cultures rather than remaining constant. Elfenbein started researching emotional variability when she found evidence of the phenomenon in scholarly research arguing the universality of emotions. She also researched emotions in the workplace and their effects during and after negotiations. Elfenbein developed a framework for consolidating and integrating the emotional intelligence theories of several researchers into a coherent structure. The research received the ten-year impact award from the journal due to its contribution to creating a comprehensive structure for emotional intelligence concepts.
Hillary Anger Elfenbein researched several areas and concepts revolving around emotions and their variations across cultures, their effects in the workplace, and their role in negotiations. However, the research on emotional differences across cultures had the most notable impact on existing research due to the contrasting theory developed and promoted by Elfenbein. Her research illustrated that people express and recognize emotions more effectively and accurately when interacting with people from their culture than members from other cultures. Although Elfenbein’s work initially received controversy, similar to other scholarly works that go against established theories, it transformed psychology and organizational behavior by introducing new concepts. Her research influenced subsequent scholarly research on emotional variability across cultures while improving insights into emotions across cultures, workplaces, and negotiation.