title: Perceiving emotions: Cueing social categorization processes and attentional control through facial expressions.
abstract: Individuals spontaneously categorise other people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity and age. But what about the emotions they express? In two studies we tested the hypothesis that facial expressions are similar to other social categories in that they can function as contextual cues to control attention. In Experiment 1 we associated expressions of anger and happiness with specific proportions of congruent/incongruent flanker trials. We also created consistent and inconsistent category members within each of these two general contexts. The results demonstrated that participants exhibited a larger congruency effect when presented with faces in the emotional group associated with a high proportion of congruent trials. Notably, this effect transferred to inconsistent members of the group. In Experiment 2 we replicated the effects with faces depicting true and false smiles. Together these findings provide consistent evidence that individuals spontaneously utilise emotions to categorise others and that such categories determine the allocation of attentional control.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Experimental Psychology , University of Granada , Granada , Spain.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Cañadas
authors.affiliation: a Department of Experimental Psychology , University of Granada , Granada , Spain.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lupiáñez
authors.affiliation: b Department of Psychology , York University , Toronto , ON , Canada.
authors.forename: Kerry
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kawakami
authors.affiliation: c Laboratory of Cognitive and Social Psychology , Blaise Pascal University , Clermont-Ferrand , France.
authors.forename: Paula M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Niedenthal
authors.affiliation: d Department of Social Psychology , University of Granada , Granada , Spain.
authors.forename: Rosa
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rodríguez-Bailón
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attentional control; Categorization; Emotion; Social-context-specific proportion congruency effect