In many social situations emotion is most powerfully and commonly carried nonverbally via voice quality and facial expression. Nonverbally carried emotion is deeply embedded in social interaction, playing an integral role in organizing social cognition. The current proposal addresses how nonverbally carried emotions participate in cognitive processing, controlling attention, guiding comprehension and perception, thus channelling the whole direction of subsequent cognitive and behavior activities. Because nonverbal signals of emotion, unlike emotional verbal content, can activate emotional responses before more elaborate processing occurs, an in-depth analysis of these vehicles of emotion may reveal some important, and hitherto unknown, modes of emotional regulation of social cognition. Drawing on several preliminary studies, the current proposal seeks: (1) to outline the nature and scope of emotional regulation of selective attention by determining the conditions in which attention spontaneously allocated to a contextual message is either increased or decreased by the emotional voice tone of the message; (2) to outline the nature and scope of emotional regulation of comprehension by determining the conditions in which comprehension of a spoken message is either enhanced or impaired by its emotional voice tone; and (3) to outline the nature and scope of emotional regulation of perception by determining the conditions in which perceptibility of human faces is either enhanced or impaired by their own emotional expressions.
