Emotion words shape emotion percepts.
People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role for emotion concepts in the formation of visual percepts of emotion. As predicted, we found that perceptual priming of emotional faces (e.g., a scowling face) was disrupted when the accessibility of a relevant emotion word (e.g., anger) was temporarily reduced, demonstrating that the exact same face was encoded differently when a word was accessible versus when it was not. The implications of these findings for a linguistically relative view of emotion perception are discussed.
Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. gendroma@bc.edu
Maria
M
Gendron
Kristen A
KA
Lindquist
Lawrence
L
Barsalou
Lisa Feldman
LF
Barrett
D001245:Association Learning; D003210:Concept Formation; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D019545:Intuition; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D060865:Repetition Priming; D012660:Semantics; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D056345:Theory of Mind