Abstract
Access to words used to label emotion concepts (e.g., “disgust”) facilitates perceptions of facial muscle movements as instances of specific emotions (see Lindquist & Gendron, 2013). However, it remains unclear whether the effect of language on emotion perception is unique or whether it is driven by language’s tendency to evoke situational context. In two studies, we used a priming and perceptual matching task to test the hypothesis that the effect of language on emotion perception is unique to that of situational context. We found that participants were more accurate to perceptually match facial portrayals of emotion after being primed with emotion labels as compared to situational context or control stimuli. These findings add to growing evidence that language serves as context for emotion perception and demonstrates for the first time that the effect of language on emotion perception is not merely a consequence of evoked situational context.
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Data Availability
Data are publicly available at https://osf.io/v83xr/.
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Funding
Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to Cameron M. Doyle.
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This research was conducted in a manner approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Code used for data analysis is publicly available at https://osf.io/v83xr/.
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Handling Editor: Wendy Berry Mendes
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Doyle, C.M., Gendron, M. & Lindquist, K.A. Language Is a Unique Context for Emotion Perception. Affec Sci 2, 171–177 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00025-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00025-7