Emotion perception from a componential perspective

ABSTRACT

The common conceptual understanding of emotion is that they are multi-componential, including subjective feelings, appraisals, psychophysiological activation, action tendencies, and motor expressions. Emotion perception, however, has traditionally been studied in terms of emotion labels, such as “happy”, which do not clearly indicate whether one, some, or all emotion components are perceived. We examine whether emotion percepts are multi-componential and extend previous research by using more ecologically valid, dynamic, and multimodal stimuli and an alternative response measure. The results demonstrate that observers can reliably infer multiple types of information (subjective feelings, appraisals, action tendencies, and social messages) from complex emotion expressions. Furthermore, this finding appears to be robust to changes in response items. The results are discussed in light of their implications for research on emotion perception.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion perception
• componential emotion
• emotion expression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at doi:10.1080/02699931.2015.1075964.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an ERC Advanced Grant in the European Community's 7th Framework Program under grant agreement 230331-PROPEREMO (Production and perception of emotion: an affective sciences approach) to Klaus Scherer and by the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Affective Sciences financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (51NF40-104897) and hosted by the University of Geneva.