Perceiving emotions: Cueing social categorization processes and attentional control through facial expressions

Abstract

Individuals spontaneously categorise other people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity and age. But what about the emotions they express? In two studies we tested the hypothesis that facial expressions are similar to other social categories in that they can function as contextual cues to control attention. In Experiment 1 we associated expressions of anger and happiness with specific proportions of congruent/incongruent flanker trials. We also created consistent and inconsistent category members within each of these two general contexts. The results demonstrated that participants exhibited a larger congruency effect when presented with faces in the emotional group associated with a high proportion of congruent trials. Notably, this effect transferred to inconsistent members of the group. In Experiment 2 we replicated the effects with faces depicting true and false smiles. Together these findings provide consistent evidence that individuals spontaneously utilise emotions to categorise others and that such categories determine the allocation of attentional control.

Keywords:

• Categorization
• Attentional control
• Emotion
• Social-context-specific proportion congruency effect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Categorisation is not always the outcome when using this paradigm. As part of a doctoral dissertation (accessible at: http://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/10481/25133/1/21595574.pdf) we conducted a study using the same basic procedure as the two experiments presented here but that included as stimuli four animals and four tools (instead of two groups of faces). The results of this study showed a significant group × stimuli consistency interaction, F(1, 28) = 7.17, p = .012; η² =.20, in which the effect of the inconsistent pictures was opposite to that of the consistent pictures. Therefore in this study we found individuation rather than categorisation. We assume that in this latter case participants learned about eight individual contexts rather than about two categories.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports through a predoctoral [grant number FPU: AP2007-04250] to the first author, and research [grant numbers PSI2010-17877, PSI2011-22416, PSI2014-52764-P and PSI2013-45678-P] to the second and last authors.