Abstract
Emotional valence is predominately conveyed in social interactions by words and facial expressions. The existence of broad biases which favor more efficient processing of positive or negative emotions is still a controversial matter. While so far this question has been investigated separately for each modality, in this narrative review of the literature we focus on valence effects in processing both words and facial expressions. In order to identify the factors underlying positivity and negativity effects, and to uncover whether these effects depend on modality and age, we present and analyze three representative overviews of the literature concerning valence effects in word processing, face processing, and combinations of word and face processing. Our analysis of word processing studies points to a positivity bias or a balanced processing of positive and negative words, whereas the analysis of face processing studies showed the existence of separate positivity and negativity biases depending on the experimental paradigm. The mixed results seem to be a product of the different methods and types of stimuli being used. Interestingly, we found that children exhibit a clear positivity advantage for both word and face processing, indicating similar processing biases in both modalities. Over the course of development, the initial positivity advantage gradually disappears, and in some face processing studies even reverses into a negativity bias. We therefore conclude that there is a need for future research that systematically analyses the impact of age and modality on the emergence of these valence effects. Finally, we discuss possible explanations for the presence of the early positivity advantage and its subsequent decrease.
Highlights
Emotional Valence in Human Perception and ProcessingEmotional stimuli are highly relevant for human behavior since humans have to process such stimuli very quickly in order to detect and react to events important for our survival
In addition to the literature search describe above, we searched for studies that investigated valence effects in word processing with typically-developing children as participants, using the search term combinations “positive OR negative OR neutral AND word∗ AND children,” “emotion∗ AND word∗ AND children,” and “valence AND word∗ AND children.”
The theoretical foundation for the negativity bias stems from ideas about the evolutionary relevance of emotional faces (Baumeister et al, 2001; Vaish et al, 2008): Negative faces such as those displaying anger can serve as a warning of a threat from a rival individual, a fearful face can indicate that a fellow human has sensed an approaching predator, while a disgusted face can convey information regarding the suitability of a plant for consumption
Summary
Emotional stimuli are highly relevant for human behavior since humans have to process such stimuli very quickly in order to detect and react to events important for our survival. Bayer and Schacht (2014), Goh et al (2016), and Hofmann et al (2009) showed that positive words generally elicit faster reaction times than negative words in lexical decision tasks, with similar effects being found in semantic (Goh et al, 2016) and emotional categorization (Feyereisen et al, 1986) tasks. Sylvester et al (2016) confirmed an advantage for positive words for children between 9 and 12 years of age who participated in an emotional categorization task. Nasrallah and Carmel (2009) demonstrated enhanced sensitivity to negative word valence in a categorization task with adults, and suggest that negative stimuli enjoy preferential access to perceptual processing. Three-year old children recognize positive faces better than negative ones, but this difference seems to be weaker in older children (Freitag and Schwarzer, 2011). Gao et al (2010), studying children between 7 and 14 years of age, showed that reactions of older children are more similar to those of adults than those of younger children, and concluded that an adult-like representation of facial expressions develops gradually during childhood
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