title: Nonautomatic emotion perception in a dual-task situation.
abstract: Are emotions perceived automatically? Two psychological refractory period experiments were conducted to ascertain whether emotion perception requires central attentional resources. Task 1 required an auditory discrimination (tone vs. noise), whereas Task 2 required a discrimination between happy and angry faces. The difficulty of Task 2 was manipulated by varying the degree of emotional expression. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between Task 1 and Task 2 was also varied. Experiment 1 revealed additive effects of SOA and Task 2 emotion-perception difficulty. Experiment 2 replicated the additive relationship with a stronger manipulation of emotion-perception difficulty. According to locus-of-slack logic, our participants did not process emotional expressions while central resources were devoted to Task 1. We conclude that emotion perception is not fully automatic.
authors.affiliation: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA.
authors.forename: Dave
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tomasik
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ruthruff
authors.forename: Philip A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Allen
authors.forename: Mei-Ching
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Lien
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D001332:Automatism / Q000523:psychology*; D001364:Awareness; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004644:Emotions; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012033:Refractory Period, Psychological; D055815:Young Adult