Cognitive penetrability and emotion recognition in human facial expressions
- Do our background beliefs, desires, and mental images influence our perceptual experience of the emotions of others? In this paper, we will address the possibility of cognitive penetration (CP) of perceptual experience in the domain of social cognition. In particular, we focus on emotion recognition based on the visual experience of facial expressions. After introducing the current debate on CP, we review examples of perceptual adaptation for facial expressions of emotion. This evidence supports the idea that facial expressions are perceptually processed \(\textit {as wholes}\). That is, the perceptual system integrates lower-level facial features, such as eyebrow orientation, mouth angle etc., into facial compounds. We then present additional experimental evidence showing that in some cases, emotion recognition on the basis of facial expression is sensitive to and modified by the background knowledge of the subject. We argue that such sensitivity is best explained as a difference in the visual experience of the facial expression, not just as a modification of the judgment based on this experience. The difference in experience is characterized as the result of the interference of background knowledge with the perceptual integration process for faces. Thus, according to the best explanation, we have to accept CP in some cases of emotion recognition. Finally, we discuss a recently proposed mechanism for CP in the face-based recognition of emotion.
Author: | Francesco MarchiGND, Albert NewenORCiDGND |
---|---|
URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:294-59094 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00828 |
Parent Title (English): | Frontiers in psychology |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2018/07/11 |
Date of first Publication: | 2015/06/19 |
Publishing Institution: | Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsbibliothek |
Tag: | Open Access Fonds adaptation; cognitive penetrability; emotion recognition; facial expressions; social perception |
Volume: | 6 |
First Page: | 828-1 |
Last Page: | 828-12 |
Note: | Article Processing Charge funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Open Access Publication Fund of Ruhr-Universität Bochum. |
Note: | Frontiers in psychology, Bd. 6.2015, Artikelnummer 828 |
Institutes/Facilities: | Institut für Philosophie II |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | Philosophie und Psychologie / Psychologie |
open_access (DINI-Set): | open_access |
faculties: | Fakultät für Philosophie und Erziehungswissenschaft |
Licence (English): | Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 - Attribution 4.0 International |