Language as context for the perception of emotion

Abstract

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 and proceeds independently of conceptual processes such as language. In this paper we suggest otherwise and offer the hypothesis that language functions as a context in emotion perception. We review a variety of evidence consistent with the language-as-context view and then discuss how a linguistically relative approach to emotion perception allows for intriguing and generative questions about the extent to which language shapes the sensory processing involved in seeing emotion in another person's face.

Figure 1

The role of context in emotion perception (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux). Look at United States Senator Jim Webb in (a). Taken out of context, he looks agitated and aggressive. Yet look at him again in (b). When situated, he appears happy and excited. Without context, and with only the structural information from the face as a guide, it is easy to mistake the emotion that you see in another person. A similar error in perception was said to have cost Howard Dean the opportunity to run for President of the United States in 2004.

Figure 2

The natural-kind model of emotion (adapted from [2] with permission). A natural-kind model of emotion states that emotions are triggered by an event and are expressed as a recognizable signature consisting of behavioral and physiological outputs that are coordinated in time and correlated in intensity [–56]. Presumably, these patterns allow people (including scientists) to know an emotion when they see it by merely looking at the structural features of the emoter’s face.

Figure 3

Semantic-satiation paradigm. Participants in [22] performed a number of trials in which they repeated an emotion word such as ‘anger’ aloud either three times (temporarily increasing its accessibility) or 30 times (temporarily reducing its accessibility), after which they were asked to judge whether two faces matched or did not match in emotional content. Participants were slower and less accurate to correctly judge emotional faces (e.g. two anger faces) as matching when they had repeated the relevant emotion word (e.g. ‘anger’) 30 times (i.e. when the meaning of the word was made temporarily inaccessible). By examining response times and accuracy rates for various trial types, researchers were able to rule out fatigue as an alternative explanation for the observed effects (e.g. emotion perception was similarly encumbered when participants repeated an irrelevant emotion word either three or 30 times, whereas fatigue would have caused a decrease only when the word was repeated 30 times).