The perception and categorisation of emotional stimuli: A review

Abstract

When we perceive our environment, we rapidly integrate large amounts of incoming stimulus information into categories that help to guide our understanding of the world. Some stimuli are more relevant for our well-being and survival than others, for example stimuli that signal a threat or an opportunity for growth and expansion. In this review we examine the special role of such “emotional” stimuli in perception and categorisation. To this end, we first discuss some fundamental aspects of perception, with an emphasis on the cognitive process of categorisation. We then tackle the questions: “What is an emotional stimulus?” and “What is an emotion category?” Afterwards, we illustrate, with a review of key findings from the empirical literature, (i) how stimuli are categorised as emotional, and (ii) how the perceptual processing of emotional stimuli is prioritised to allow for a rapid preparation of adaptive responses. To conclude, we discuss how research on the perception of emotional stimuli can contribute to current debates in psychology, namely (i) about the role of bottom-up vs. top-down factors in emotional processing and experience, and (ii) about the nature of the relationship between cognition and emotion.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Perception
• Categorisation

Acknowledgements

The preparation of this article was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research for Affective Sciences, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Notes

¹In this context, one finds frequent analogies between perceptual and emotional categories. For example, according to Izard (2007), “it is possible to argue by analogy that the capacity to discriminate among basic-emotion feeling states, like discriminating among basic tastes, is innate and invariant across the lifespan” and “the data relating to the underlying neural and behavioral processes suggest that the emergence of discriminable basic emotion feelings is analogous to that for basic tastes” (see Sander, 2008).

²In well-defined categories, category membership can be defined by one or more individually necessary and jointly sufficient features, as is the case for example for “square” or “grandfather”.

³One should be aware that “emotional stimuli” as used in the studies presented here only very rarely elicit a full-blown emotion with an intense subjective feeling component. Reading the word “snake” will probably not very often be linked with experiencing strong feelings of fear. However, as shown by the evidence reviewed in this article, the perceptual processing of the word may still be increased compared to emotionally neutral words.