In the blink of an eye, people can easily see emotion in another person's face. This fact leads many to assume that emotion perception is given from just the information on another person's face, like reading the words on a page. Yet research shows that participants mislabeled a facial portrayals of fear as "anger" as much as 60-75% percent of the time when it was paired with contextual information associated with the experience of anger. Context plays an important role in emotion perception. Context refers not only to the external surroundings in which facial actions take place, but also to brain processes running in parallel that dynamically constrain or shape how structural information from a face is processed. With this grant, the researchers focus on one such process -- language -- by exploring the idea that emotion words (implicitly or explicitly) serve as an internal context to constrain the meaning of a face during an instance of emotion perception. A series of six studies will be conducted using a technique known as semantic satiation to temporarily render the meaning of an emotion word inaccessible to assess the impact of word inaccessibility on people's ability to perceive emotion in another person's face. Furthermore, three potential mechanisms by which language might influences emotion perception will be examined. Language may help to resolve competing "perceptual hypotheses" that arise from a structural analysis of the face, particularly when other contextual information fails to do so, or when such information is absent altogether (the categorization hypothesis). Second, it is possible that emotion words may influence how people sample and process the sensory information in a visual array (a face) to construct an emotional percept (the sensory sampling hypothesis). A third, perhaps more intriguing possibility, is that language dynamically reconfigures how structural information from the face is processed; when a word comes to mind, it may be associated with a reactivation (or simulation) of specific sensory information previous paired with the word, which then contributes to how incoming sensory information from a face is processed (the sensory inference hypothesis). From a scientific standpoint, language-as-context framework applies the Linguistic Relativity debate to the question of how far down into perception language can reach. From a practical standpoint, these studies will show that the emotions you see in others, and therefore your expectations for their behavior, are influenced by what you know about emotion (especially the language that you speak). If language intrinsically shapes the emotion perceived in other people, then acquisition and elaboration of linguistic categories may influence people's perceptual capacities. It may well be the case that people can be taught to become better emotion perceivers, and hence, better communicators.
