Abstract
Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants’ propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.
Highlights
Emotions and mood provide powerful prisms which shape the way individuals interpret social information and their environment
Average change values revealed that the slope of the discrimination performance was increased after exposure to negative compared to neutral movies, whereas this change was negligible after exposure to positive movies
We tested the hypothesis that several minutes of immersion into positive and/or negative emotional movies, may generate sustained affective states that outlast by ~2 minutes the exposure period and subsequently bias the interpretation of face expressions in a perceptual decision making task
Summary
Emotions and mood provide powerful prisms which shape the way individuals interpret social information and their environment. Depending on their affective state, people may see the glass as either half full or half empty when evaluating the same situation. Most priming studies assume that these biases are short-lived and do not persist more than a fraction of second. We addressed this issue by using a simple forced-choice categorization task where subjects evaluated facial expressions morphed between fear and happiness after being exposed for several minutes to negative, positive, or neutral movie clips. We tested whether such biases depend on more persistent affective states related to individual personality characteristics such as positive and negative mood as well as sub-clinical levels of anxiety and depression
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