Abstract
Fantoni & Gerbino (2014) showed that subtle postural shifts associated with reaching can have a strong hedonic impact and affect how actors experience facial expressions of emotion. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP), they found consistent congruency effects in participants who performed a facial emotion identification task after a sequence of visually-guided reaches: a face perceived as neutral in a baseline condition appeared slightly happy after comfortable actions and slightly angry after uncomfortable actions. However, skeptics about the penetrability of perception (Zeimbekis & Raftopoulos, 2015) would consider such evidence insufficient to demonstrate that observer’s internal states induced by action comfort/discomfort affect perception in a top-down fashion. The action-modulated mood might have produced a back-end memory effect capable of affecting post-perceptual and decision processing, but not front-end perception.Here, we present evidence that performing a facial emotion detection (not identification) task after MAMIP exhibits systematic mood-congruent sensitivity changes, rather than response bias changes attributable to cognitive set shifts; i.e., we show that observer’s internal states induced by bodily action can modulate affective perception. The detection threshold for happiness was lower after fifty comfortable than uncomfortable reaches; while the detection threshold for anger was lower after fifty uncomfortable than comfortable reaches. Action valence induced an overall sensitivity improvement in detecting subtle variations of congruent facial expressions (happiness after positive comfortable actions, anger after negative uncomfortable actions), in the absence of significant response bias shifts. Notably, both comfortable and uncomfortable reaches impact sensitivity in an approximately symmetric way relative to a baseline inaction condition. All of these constitute compelling evidence of a genuine top-down effect on perception: specifically, facial expressions of emotion are penetrable by action-induced mood. Affective priming by action valence is a candidate mechanism for the influence of observer’s internal states on properties experienced as phenomenally objective and yet loaded with meaning.
Highlights
Penetrability of perception (Firestone & Scholl, 2015; Gerbino & Fantoni, 2016; Zeimbekis & Raftopoulos, 2015) refers–among others–to the possible effects of bodily actions onHow to cite this article Fantoni et al (2016), Bodily action penetrates affective perception
Observers should be both fast and accurate when making their yes/no judgment on whether the face contained the emotion signal. Such a method minimized the role of cognitive top-down factors, unavoidable in the facial emotion identification procedure used by Fantoni & Gerbino (2014), and allowed us to decide whether Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP) influenced emotion detection
The present study demonstrates that the internal state of comfort/discomfort induced by reaching affects the detection of facial expressions in a direction consistent with the congruency between the valence of the action induced transient mood and the target emotion
Summary
Penetrability of perception (Firestone & Scholl, 2015; Gerbino & Fantoni, 2016; Zeimbekis & Raftopoulos, 2015) refers–among others–to the possible effects of bodily actions onHow to cite this article Fantoni et al (2016), Bodily action penetrates affective perception. As a case in point, the categorical perception and representation of emotionally expressive faces have been found to depend on bodily affective experience: children exposed to negative affective experience (e.g., physical abuse) over-identified anger relative to control children and produced discrimination peaks reflecting broader perceptual categorization of anger, relative to fear and sadness (Pollak & Kistler, 2002). This is consistent with the James-Lange theory of emotion (James, 1884) and recent evidence supporting the view that emotions are represented as culturally universal somatotopic maps; i.e., topographically distinct bodily sensations underlying the categorical perception of different emotions (Nummenmaa et al, 2014)
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