Adult attachment and the perception of facial expression of emotion.

Adult attachment orientation has been associated with specific patterns of emotion regulation. The present research examined the effects of attachment orientation on the perceptual processing of emotional stimuli. Experimental participants played computerized movies of faces that expressed happiness, sadness, and anger. Over the course of the movies, the facial expressions became neutral. Participants reported the frame at which the initial expression no longer appeared on the face. Under conditions of no distress (Study 1), fearfully attached individuals saw the offset of both happiness and anger earlier, and preoccupied and dismissive individuals later, than the securely attached individuals. Under conditions of distress (Study 2), insecurely attached individuals perceived the offset of negative facial expressions as occurring later than did the secure individuals, and fearfully attached individuals saw the offset later than either of the other insecure groups. The mechanisms underlying the effects are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion concepts and emotional states in social judgment and categorization.

An objection to conclusions of research investigating effects of emotions on cognitive processes is that the effects are due to the activation of semantic concepts rather than to emotional feelings. A sentence unscrambling task was developed to prime concepts of happiness, sadness, or neutral ideas. Pilot studies demonstrated that unscrambling emotional sentences did not affect emotional state but did prime semantically related words. Experiment 1 showed that the induction of emotional state but not the sentence unscrambling task produced emotion-congruent judgments. Results of Experiment 2 showed that individuals in emotional states categorized according to emotional equivalence more often than participants in a neutral state. Sentence unscrambling had no effect on emotional response categorization. The influences of emotions and emotion knowledge in cognition and emotion are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotional response categorization.

Traditional theories of categorization in which categories are assumed to be grounded in perceptual similarity or theories ignore an important basis of conceptual structure: the emotion that a stimulus elicits in a perceiver. This article discusses the nature of, constraints on, and conditions of use of emotional response categories. Experiments in which participants sorted triads of concepts that shared both emotional and nonemotional relations indicate that individuals use emotional response categories when they are experiencing emotional states. Multidimensional scaling of similarity judgments by emotional and nonemotional perceivers supports a selective attention mechanism of these effects. Participants induced to feel happy or sad emotional states weighted the emotional responses associated with stimuli more heavily than people in relatively neutral states. The triad and multidimensional scaling findings, along with functional considerations, suggest that emotional response categorization is not only tenable, but necessary for a complete account of categorization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)