Abstract: Fake emotion refers to the process of emotional interaction that people show positive or negative emotions in disguise to amplify or suppress the original emotions. Fake emotion is the result of a strategic choice. The emotion displayed may not happen at the moment, but sometimes it can be persuasive. Fake emotions are common in daily life, but the present research on it is relatively scattered, and there are still some disputes about the interpersonal influence of fake emotion as well as its mechanism. The existing literature mainly concerns four aspects of the interpersonal effect of fake emotion, including the game process, pro-social behavior situation, organizational situation, and leadership effect. The related mechanisms include the affective reaction of the emotion receivers and the inner process of “speculating others' emotions by their own standard”. Future research can focus more on the deep and systematic study of fake emotion on the emotional receiver, group fake emotion, the valence of fake emotion, cognitive neural mechanism, culture background, and so on.

Key words: fake emotion, emotional strategy, emotion perception, emotion interaction, emotion recognition