Understanding Others: Interpretation Flashcards
What are Ekman’s basic emotions?
Anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, surprise
How can categorisation of emotions be summarised?
Certain facial expressions of emotion are universally recognised. Evidence that these expressions belong to separate cognitive categories, which may be a product of linguistics, neuronal activation patterns, low level stimulus qualities. Categorical perception in infants suggest categories may be pre-linguistic
How does depression (or similar) affect expression categorisation?
Depressed participants are worse at perceiving emotions and see faces as being more negative
What is the implied model for facial expression categorisation?
Emotional stimulus leads to emotional expression identification which leads to further processing and then leads to behaviour. Focus is on behaviour and enters the question of whether facial expression is a necessary stage
How does anxiety affect expression categorisation?
Hypothesis that more anxious individuals have a greater focus on threatening stimuli, at least initially. More anxious individuals are more focused on expression
What was Richards et al 2002 study?
Participants saw mixed emotion stimuli and categorised them into basic emotions. Found no effect of anxiety manipulation on fear categorisation, though it did cause participants to interpret faces as being angry more often
What are the effects of diazepam on interpretation of emotion?
Selective effect of decrease for anger expression identification (Blair and Curran 1999). Selective decrease for anger and fear identification (Zangara et al 2002). Broad impairment across all emotions (Coupland et al 2003)
What did Easter et al 2005 find?
Children and adolescents with anxiety disorders are generally poorer at facial expression recognition
What did Cooper et al 208 find?
Argued that timing is important and that previous studies allowed participants as much time as needed. Cooper allowed participants up to 4s and found no significant effects of anxiety
What was Heuer et al 2007 study?
Measured the effect of anxiety on behaviour using an approach-avoidance task (AATs). Socially anxious individuals were faster at the avoidance response to both angry and smiling faces. This was replicated by Roelofs et al 2010
What was Taylor and Amir 2012 study?
Manipulation of response tendencies in anxiety via AAT.. Found effects on IAT and effects on participant behaviour
What are problems with IAT (implicit associations) based tasks?
Relationship between joystick movement and actual behaviour. Ambiguity of changing stimulus on-screen size to emulate approach/withdrawal. Despite expectations, approach and withdrawal of strongly positive and negative stimuli results in only small to medium effect sizes (Phaf et al 2014). Limited realism of stimuli
What did Bouhuys et al 1995 find?
Mood induction by music and rating of faces for amount of fear, hapiness, anger, sadness, disgust, rejection and invitation. Depressing music induced perception of ambiguous faces as showing more rejection and sadness and less invitation and happiness
What did Niedenthal et al 2000 find?
Mood induction to induce happiness of sadness. Subjects moved through the animation until they perceive the expression change. Emotion congruent expressions were perceived to persist longer than emotion incongruent expressions
What did Cooley and Nowicki 1989 find?
Depressed participants slower at facial expression task only, and concluded that depression related to general difficulty in processing facial expressions. Question on whether this leads to poor interpersonal relationships due to poorer accuracy of perception, and bias towards negative perceptions
