When a Coworker’s Feeling Label May Be Wrong

Acknowledge what you can observe; leave the label open

When a coworker looks tense after a difficult update, you can notice the pause, tightened expression, or their own words without knowing exactly what they feel. Workplace research gives a reason to acknowledge the moment: a response can signal that you noticed and are willing to give the person attention. Yet naming an emotion adds an interpretation to that signal. The study Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust found that accurate labels drew higher trust ratings than inaccurate ones, and that the effect of an error depended on its direction. In brief videos, calling displayed anxiety “excitement” did not earn higher trust than silence; calling displayed excitement “anxiety” did. That difference makes a confident upbeat reading of a negative display difficult to justify as a safe default. The evidence is narrower than a rule for workplace conversation. The study’s direct accuracy test asked online viewers to judge short acted coworker videos, not the people receiving a label in a real exchange. It measured immediate judgments of trust. So the practical conclusion is modest: show that you are attending, but do not present your guess as knowledge. If a colleague has named the feeling, use their word. If not, describe what you observed or ask in a way that leaves room for correction. The researchers tested judgments of particular labels, not these suggested phrases; this is a cautious inference, not a validated conversational script.

Sources: Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust

Why can a simple acknowledgment change how a coworker is judged?

When a coworker says, “You seem upset,” the sentence does more than attach a word to a face. It tells the other person that someone noticed and chose to respond. In “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust,” acknowledgment is treated as a signal that the listener may be willing to spend time, energy, and attention on another person’s emotional needs. The authors call this perceived costliness: an observer’s inference that responding takes resources that could have gone elsewhere. The term matters because the proposed trust signal lies in the choice to engage, not simply in naming an emotion accurately. The paper treats that signal as a possible reading of the response, rather than evidence about the responder’s actual workload or private motive. The evidence begins with a workplace association. Study 1 surveyed 246 healthcare employees in two intensive-care units at one children’s hospital. Employees who reported more coworker acknowledgment also reported greater trust. Acknowledgment of negative emotions remained associated with trust after adjustment for job satisfaction, stress, and team functioning; positive-emotion acknowledgment did not. Because the survey measured existing behavior and attitudes at one point, it cannot show that acknowledgment caused trust. A trusting team might also make people more likely to mention emotions. Study 2 gave the authors a stronger test of cause. In a vignette experiment with 374 participants, people read a work-related scenario and were randomly presented with a coworker who did or did not acknowledge the emotion. Participants judged the acknowledging coworker as more trustworthy, with a larger effect when the scenario involved a negative rather than positive emotion. Their analysis found that this perception helped account for the trust difference, especially for negative emotions. The randomized response supports a causal claim about judgments within the scenario. The experiment also measured whether participants saw acknowledgment as costly, connecting the response to the proposed signal. It still does not demonstrate lasting trust in an actual workplace relationship. Why might negative emotions carry a stronger signal? The paper proposes that distress can imply an unmet need. Addressing it may call for listening, emotional effort, or follow-up, while responding to good news may feel less demanding. This is the authors’ explanatory account, not proof that a listener has accurately understood the feeling. “Feeling Seen: What to Say When Your Employees Are Not OK,” an overview from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge, conveys the broad finding that mentioning negative feelings can support trust. Its broad account needs the primary article’s distinction between field association and scenario evidence. Neither finding settles what to say when an emotion label may be mistaken. A response can signal attention while also carrying an interpretation. Silence and acknowledgment can communicate different levels of attention, but the trust evidence alone cannot choose the right feeling word.

Sources: Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust; Feeling Seen: What to Say When Your Employees Are Not OK

What did the direct test of a mistaken label actually find?

Study 6 of “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust” tested the question more directly than the paper’s earlier experiments. The researchers recruited 581 people through Mechanical Turk and randomly assigned them to watch a short video of two coworkers in a breakroom. One coworker displayed either anxiety or excitement. The other either named the displayed emotion accurately, used the opposite label, or said nothing. Viewers then rated the responding coworker’s trustworthiness. Anxiety and excitement have similar arousal but opposite valence, or positive versus negative tone, and can be easy to confuse.

Across the study, accurate acknowledgment drew higher trust ratings than either an inaccurate label or silence. The overall averages were 5.04 for accurate acknowledgment, 4.63 for inaccurate acknowledgment, and 4.16 for no acknowledgment on the study’s trust measure. The difference between an accurate and inaccurate label was especially clear when the video showed anxiety: accurate acknowledgment outperformed the mistaken label. For excitement, the study did not find a significant difference between accurate and inaccurate acknowledgment.

The most useful result for a possible mistake is the comparison between an inaccurate label and silence. When the coworker displayed excitement but was called anxious, viewers rated the responder as more trustworthy than when the responder said nothing. When the coworker displayed anxiety but was called excited, the inaccurate label did not significantly outperform silence. The direction of the error therefore mattered. Treating a negative display as positive did not receive the same benefit as reading a positive display as negative.

The authors explain the pattern through perceived costliness: responding to apparent anxiety may signal willingness to give time and attention to someone who could need support; calling it “excitement” may not. This explains average judgments, not what any individual coworker thinks or needs. The experiment also measured third-party viewers’ immediate trust ratings, not the trust of the person being labeled, the quality of a real conversation, or later collaboration.

So the finding resists two simple rules: “any acknowledgment helps” and “every mistaken label harms.” The studied mismatch mattered more when a negative display was relabeled as positive. Since the videos tested only two emotions and left no room for the person shown to clarify their experience, they cannot tell a colleague exactly what words to use in an uncertain live exchange. They do show why an upbeat reinterpretation of an apparent negative reaction deserves care: it can sound as if the reaction has not been registered. That is a reason to avoid confident relabeling, not evidence that a particular phrase will reliably build trust.

Sources: Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust

Why is a feeling word more than a description?

Emotion words can imply a story about what happened and who had control, not just name a mood. In the first, 70 U.S. participants read a scenario about a friend describing a phone-order problem; the friend was either angry or regretful. Participants attributed more agency to the friend in the regret condition than in the anger condition (mean ratings 3.76 versus 2.61), and more agency to another person in the anger condition (5.82 versus 4.71). Agency here means who observers thought had caused the state of affairs. “Deriving meaning from others’ emotions: attribution, appraisal, and the use of emotions as social information” shows that an emotional display can shape causal interpretation when facts are unclear.

The second study added a no-emotion control and used a car-accident scenario, with 179 U.S. participants assigned to anger, regret, or control conditions. Anger tended to direct observers toward another person as responsible, whereas regret directed them toward the expresser; anger was also read as a sign of injustice. These are judgments by readers of scenarios about friends, not observations of coworkers responding to a label in conversation. The scenarios clarify one way emotion may guide interpretation; they cannot establish what a colleague intended by a word or how a real conversation would unfold.

That distinction matters when someone names a coworker’s feeling. Saying “you’re angry” can sound as if the speaker has decided what the colleague feels; it may also suggest the colleague is blaming someone. Calling the response “regret” could imply that the person sees themself as responsible. The study did not test these workplace phrases or establish that every listener makes these inferences. A label offered by the person experiencing the emotion is different evidence from a label supplied by an observer.

A related workplace experiment makes the distinction between acknowledgment and interpretation relevant. In “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust,” 581 online participants watched short acted videos of coworkers displaying anxiety or excitement and rated trust. Accurate labels received higher trust ratings than inaccurate ones. Calling excitement anxiety did better than silence; calling anxiety excitement did not significantly outperform silence. The emotions were selected for similar arousal but opposite valence. Together, they suggest why a confident feeling word can do more than show attention: it may also assign meaning to the event, and accuracy can matter.

When a label might assign blame or soften a real concern, a neutral observation carries less interpretation. “The decision changed after the review” describes an event; “you’re relieved” supplies a feeling and may imply how the colleague regards the change. The evidence does not show that neutral wording reliably improves trust. This is a cautious conversational inference, not a tested script. If the colleague has named the feeling, their word is a sounder starting point than guessing from expression. Otherwise, describe what happened or ask what they made of it, leaving room for them to supply the meaning.

Sources: Deriving meaning from others’ emotions: attribution, appraisal, and the use of emotions as social information; Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust

Why does calling a negative reaction positive deserve special care?

A positive label can do more than soften an exchange. When a coworker appears anxious, disappointed, or frustrated, saying they seem excited may suggest the speaker has not registered the problem behind the reaction. That is a plausible reading of the evidence, not a claim about how every colleague would hear it.

In “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust,” the authors propose that acknowledging emotion signals willingness to spend time, energy, and attention on another person. They call this a costly signal: the response directs limited resources toward someone else. Negative emotions carry particular weight in this account. They can indicate a problem or need that may take effort to understand or address, so accurately acknowledging them may convey readiness to engage. The authors tested perceived costliness in their study program; what a specific coworker privately needs remains an interpretation.

That mechanism helps explain the error direction in the paper’s sixth study. Online participants watched short acted coworker videos displaying anxiety or excitement, then rated a perceiver’s trustworthiness after an accurate acknowledgment, an inaccurate one, or silence. The 581 participants saw emotions chosen for similar arousal but opposite valence: anxiety was negative, excitement positive. When the display was anxiety, calling it excitement did not produce significantly higher trust ratings than silence. The authors suggest that a positive label may fail to signal readiness to respond to the heightened need observers associate with negative emotion. The experiment measured observers’ immediate judgments, not what actors felt about the label or how coworkers would respond over time.

“Deriving meaning from others’ emotions: attribution, appraisal, and the use of emotions as social information” shows why emotion words can imply more than mood. Two vignette studies asked participants to read about a friend expressing anger or regret after an ambiguous negative event. In the first, 70 U.S. adults recruited online were assigned to an anger or regret scenario. Participants attributed more agency to another person when the friend expressed anger, and more agency to the friend when they expressed regret. A second study with 179 U.S. adults added a no-emotion comparison and again found that anger and regret shifted judgments about who caused or controlled the event. These were written scenarios about a friend, not coworkers being mislabeled. They illustrate that an emotion term can imply a view about responsibility as well as feeling.

Calling disappointment “relief,” for example, could blur both the feeling and what a colleague thinks went wrong. The research does not show that positive relabeling is always dismissive, or that an observer can reliably infer need from a face or tone. It does support caution when a positive interpretation would replace a clear sign of distress or concern. If the colleague has not named the feeling, an observation such as “That decision changed the plan” leaves the emotional conclusion open; a question about how they see the change lets them supply it. This practical inference is not a script tested by these studies.

Sources: Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust; Deriving meaning from others’ emotions: attribution, appraisal, and the use of emotions as social information

Can emotion-reading skill tell you whether a label will land well?

A person may do well on a task that asks them to identify a facial or vocal expression and still misunderstand what a colleague feels in a particular conversation. Emotion-recognition accuracy is performance at matching an expression in a photo, recording, or short clip to an emotion label. Empathic accuracy asks a different question: how closely an observer’s judgment of another person’s thoughts or feelings matches what that person reports experiencing in context. The distinction matters because a label that fits a visible cue can still miss the meaning of the moment. In “Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions,” 101 Swedish professionals completed both kinds of task. For the recognition task, participants chose among emotion labels for brief recordings. For the empathic-accuracy task, they watched or listened to four people recount negative events and judged what each narrator felt and thought. Researchers compared judgments with the narrators’ own reports. The researchers found only weak support for a relationship between emotion-recognition scores and empathic-accuracy judgments, limited to ratings of unspoken feelings from audio-only recordings. In the diary portion, 61 participants recorded meaningful social interactions over a week. Scores from the laboratory tasks showed little correspondence with diary reports about partners’ positive and negative emotions. Skill at decoding standardized expressions did not automatically transfer to understanding someone describing an event. The study has boundaries. Participants were professionals in Sweden, and the narrators discussed negative events. Diary entries recorded participants’ perceptions of interaction partners, not an independent record of those partners’ inner states. The measures had limited overlap here; a test score cannot establish whether a specific interpretation of a coworker is right. A conceptual article, “Responding to Positive Emotions at Work – The Four Steps and Potential Benefits of a Validating Response to Coworkers’ Positive Experiences,” offers a useful way to think about what happens between noticing a cue and responding. It proposes four stages: noticing, making sense of the emotion, feeling positive empathy, and engaging in a validating action. This is a theoretical framework for responding to positive experiences, not a test of scripts for uncertain labels or correcting misread emotions. Still, the distinction between noticing and making sense helps clarify the practical inference. A coworker’s brief reply may catch your attention; deciding it means anxiety or disappointment adds an interpretation. Those steps need not be collapsed into one confident statement. “You seem anxious” presents an inference as if it were settled. “That update sounded difficult. How are you feeling about it?” starts with the exchange and leaves the colleague room to name their own experience. This example is not a tested script. Emotion-reading ability, then, can help someone attend to social cues, but it cannot certify what another person means in a live exchange. Neither an emotion-recognition test nor an EQ label gives someone authority over a coworker’s account. When the feeling is unclear, treat your reading as a possibility to check. If the colleague supplies a different word, that information should guide the next response.

Sources: Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions; Responding to Positive Emotions at Work – The Four Steps and Potential Benefits of a Validating Response to Coworkers’ Positive Experiences

What can workplace summaries establish, and what do they leave out?

Workplace summaries help explain why researchers thought emotional acknowledgment might matter and the studies’ broad pattern. They are less useful when the question turns on a particular kind of mistake. “Naming a feeling can build trust” compresses distinct comparisons: Was the label accurate? What emotion did the coworker display? Who judged the response, and what did the study measure? Those details determine how far a result can travel into an actual conversation. “Feeling Seen: What to Say When Your Employees Are Not OK,” published by Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge, summarizes the broad finding. It says the research team conducted six studies with about 2,500 participants and describes the first as a survey of hospital coworkers. Employees reported whether coworkers had acknowledged their feelings during the previous two weeks and whether they trusted them. Acknowledgment, particularly of negative emotions, was associated with greater trust. That describes the survey’s direction, but it cannot establish that acknowledgment caused trust: both reports were collected at one time, so trusted coworkers may also have been more likely to notice or mention emotion. The HBS summary also describes experiments using imagined situations or workplace videos and explains the authors’ proposed “costly signaling” account: noticing a difficult feeling may signal willingness to spend time and attention on someone else. The primary paper, “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust,” reports earlier experiments that support a causal effect within their scenarios, alongside measures consistent with this explanation. This explains why acknowledgment might matter, but does not show that people consciously calculate effort or that a brief remark improves collaboration over time. The sixth study makes the specific error result visible. In this experiment, 581 online participants watched short, acted videos of coworkers. One person displayed anxiety or excitement; the other used a matching label, used the other label, or said nothing. Viewers rated trust. Accurate acknowledgment received higher ratings than an inaccurate label. But the inaccurate-versus-silent comparison depended on the displayed emotion: calling excitement “anxiety” received higher trust ratings than silence, while calling anxiety “excitement” did not significantly outperform silence. So the study does not support the blanket gloss that speaking up is better than silence when a negative feeling is mislabeled. This matters because advice can sound like permission to replace a colleague’s difficult reaction with a more comfortable interpretation. The HBS summary fairly conveys a general benefit across the study program, but its closing practical takeaway—that a wrong negative label may still be preferable to ignoring the emotion—needs the primary paper’s direction-specific result beside it. Study 6 tested one pair of emotions with brief videos, third-party judgments, and immediate trust ratings. It did not measure how the person being labeled felt, what happened in an ongoing relationship, or whether anyone repaired a misreading. Before applying advice, check the comparison (accurate, inaccurate, or absent acknowledgment), outcome (trust rating or observed collaboration), and setting (survey, vignette, or live exchange). Here, the evidence supports a narrower conclusion than “name the emotion”: attention may matter, but a guessed label adds an interpretation that can miss. A neutral observation or open question is a cautious practical inference for uncertain moments, not a script tested by these studies.

Sources: Feeling Seen: What to Say When Your Employees Are Not OK; Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust

How should you respond when the feeling is uncertain?

Start with what the colleague has actually said. If they say, “I’m disappointed about the decision,” using “disappointed” acknowledges their account without asking them to accept your reading of their face or tone. A feeling word can signal attention, but it also carries an interpretation. In “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust,” the authors distinguish recognizing an emotional display from naming the emotion inferred from it. You may notice a pause or change in expression without knowing what it means. When the colleague has not named a feeling, describe the observable event before assigning an emotion. After a proposal is set aside, a coworker goes quiet. You might say, “I noticed we moved on before discussing your proposal. How are you feeling about that?” The first sentence reports an event; the question leaves the answer with the coworker. “You’re angry that we ignored your idea” adds conclusions about anger and being ignored that may be wrong. The aim is not to avoid emotion words, but to avoid presenting an inference as knowledge. A useful sequence can be derived from the research, though no cited experiment tested this script: observe, ask or offer a tentative reading if it helps, invite correction, then respond to what you hear. If you offer a label, mark it as uncertain: “I may be reading this wrong, but you seem frustrated. Is that close?” An open question may be better when several explanations fit. Keep the wording brief so the exchange stays with the colleague’s concern. This is an inference from evidence about acknowledgment and mislabeling, not a proven conversational intervention. The reason to make correction easy is that acknowledgment is more than a display of perceptiveness. The 2021 study found that inaccurate acknowledgment did not outperform silence when anxiety was labeled excitement, while accurate acknowledgment received higher trust ratings. Participants judged short acted videos, so this result does not tell us which sentence will work in a live conversation. It does caution against replacing a negative reaction with an upbeat interpretation. An open question avoids forcing that substitution. If the colleague corrects you, use the correction as new information. “Thanks for telling me. You’re worried about the deadline, not upset with the decision. What would be useful to address first?” This is a suggested response, not wording tested by the studies. “Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions” cautions against treating emotion-decoding performance as a guarantee of understanding someone in context. Its measures do not test this exchange, but they support a modest point: reading cues cannot replace listening to the person. The research did not compare tentative and confident phrasing or test how rank, privacy, culture, or a public setting changes the response. Choose a setting with the colleague’s comfort and the subject’s sensitivity in mind. The practical standard is simpler than perfect accuracy: attend to what is visible, let the person supply what is private, and update when they do.

Sources: Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust; Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions

What does the evidence not tell us about repair and teamwork?

The evidence supports a narrower conclusion than a workplace script. In “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust,” the field survey covered 246 employees in two intensive-care units at one children’s hospital. It found an association between coworkers’ acknowledgment and trust, with a stronger association for negative emotions. Because the survey measured existing relationships at one point, it cannot show that acknowledgment caused trust to rise; coworkers who already trusted one another may acknowledge one another more. The paper’s experiments add causal evidence about judgments in controlled settings, but they do not turn that field association into proof of lasting workplace effects.

The most direct test of a mistaken label had a bounded outcome. In Study 6, 581 online participants judged short acted videos of coworkers displaying anxiety or excitement. Participants rated the responder’s trustworthiness after accurate, inaccurate, or absent acknowledgment. The direction of the error mattered. Yet viewers were not the people whose feelings had been labeled, and the study did not follow a working relationship. It cannot establish whether a colleague would feel heard, whether trust would persist, or whether the exchange would affect team performance. It did not test mixed feelings, public versus private remarks, rank differences, or responses to a correction.

Related evidence does not fill those gaps. “Emotion Recognition Accuracy and Empathic Accuracy in Professionals” studied 101 helping and non-helping professionals. Links between standardized emotion-recognition and empathic-accuracy judgments were weak; task results corresponded little with diary ratings of everyday interactions. Expression decoding therefore cannot establish that someone reads a coworker accurately. It did not test acknowledgment, tentative questions, or repair after a misread.

A simple repair is still reasonable: accept the correction, acknowledge the misread and ask what would help now. This is a practical inference, not a method tested in these studies. Whether tentative wording or that response improves trust remains an open question. The evidence supports care with guessed labels, not a promise about the next exchange.

Sources: Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust; Emotion recognition accuracy only weakly predicts empathic accuracy in a standard paradigm and in real life interactions

Turn the exchange into one behavior you can practice

In the next uncertain conversation, separate what you saw from what you think it means. You might say, “The decision changed after your update,” then leave room for the colleague to describe their response. If they have named a feeling, use their word rather than translating it. If you are unsure, ask, “How did that land for you?” and let the answer correct your reading. The studies discussed here did not test that wording; it is a cautious practice drawn from their distinction between attending to someone and claiming to know their emotion. Afterward, compare the cue you noticed, the meaning you inferred, and what the colleague actually said. This review can show when you move quickly from observation to interpretation. It cannot tell you what the other person felt; their account supplies information you did not have. “Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust” makes acknowledgment worth practicing with care, while leaving the best wording for workplace conversations unresolved. For a structured way to reflect on your emotional habits and scenario judgments, explore the private 32-item Emotional Skills Profile. It is an educational reflection tool, not a rating of colleagues. Explore the Emotional Skills Profile.

Sources: Emotional acknowledgment: How verbalizing others’ emotions fosters interpersonal trust

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