title: Processing orientation and emotion recognition.
abstract: There is evidence that some emotional expressions are characterized by diagnostic cues from individual face features. For example, an upturned mouth is indicative of happiness, whereas a furrowed brow is associated with anger. The current investigation explored whether motivating people to perceive stimuli in a local (i.e., feature-based) rather than global (i.e., holistic) processing orientation was advantageous for recognizing emotional facial expressions. Participants classified emotional faces while primed with local and global processing orientations, via a Navon letter task. Contrary to previous findings for identity recognition, the current findings are indicative of a modest advantage for face emotion recognition under conditions of local processing orientation. When primed with a local processing orientation, participants performed both significantly faster and more accurately on an emotion recognition task than when they were primed with a global processing orientation. The impacts of this finding for theories of emotion recognition and face processing are considered.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Kings College, Old Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom. doug.martin@abdn.ac.uk
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.forename: Gillian
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Slessor
authors.forename: Roy
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Allen
authors.forename: Louise H
authors.initials: LH
authors.lastname: Phillips
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Darling
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult