Language and the Perception of Emotion

在眨眼之间，人们可以很容易地看到另一个人脸上的情绪。这一事实导致许多人认为，情绪感知仅仅来自于他人脸上的信息，就像阅读一页上的文字一样。然而，研究表明，当参与者将恐惧的面部描绘与愤怒经历相关的上下文信息配对时，多达60-75%的参与者将其误认为是“愤怒”。情境在情绪感知中起着重要的作用。上下文不仅指面部动作发生的外部环境，还指并行运行的大脑过程，这些过程动态地约束或塑造了面部结构信息的处理方式。有了这笔资金，研究人员将重点放在这样一个过程上——语言——通过探索情感词汇（隐含或明确）在情感感知实例中作为一种内部语境来约束面部的意义。一系列的六项研究将使用一种被称为语义饱和的技术，暂时使一个情感词的意思无法理解，以评估词语不可理解对人们从他人脸上感知情感的能力的影响。此外，语言可能影响情绪感知的三种潜在机制将被检查。语言可能有助于解决由面部结构分析产生的竞争性“感知假设”，特别是当其他上下文信息无法做到这一点时，或者当这些信息完全缺失时（分类假设）。其次，情绪词可能会影响人们如何采样和处理视觉阵列（面部）中的感觉信息以构建情感感知（感觉采样假设）。第三种或许更有趣的可能性是，语言动态地重新配置了处理面部结构信息的方式；当一个词出现在脑海中，它可能与先前与该词配对的特定感官信息的再激活（或模拟）有关，这有助于如何处理来自面部的传入感官信息（感官推断假设）。从科学的角度来看，语言作为语境的框架将语言相对论的争论应用于语言可以达到多深的感知问题。从实际的角度来看，这些研究将表明，你在别人身上看到的情绪，以及你对他们行为的期望，都受到你对情绪的了解（尤其是你所说的语言）的影响。如果语言本质上塑造了他人感知到的情感，那么语言类别的习得和细化可能会影响人们的感知能力。很有可能，人们可以通过训练成为更好的情感感知者，从而成为更好的沟通者。

In the blink of an eye, people can easily see emotion in another person's face. This fact leads many to assume that emotion perception is given from just the information on another person's face, like reading the words on a page. Yet research shows that participants mislabeled a facial portrayals of fear as "anger" as much as 60-75% percent of the time when it was paired with contextual information associated with the experience of anger. Context plays an important role in emotion perception. Context refers not only to the external surroundings in which facial actions take place, but also to brain processes running in parallel that dynamically constrain or shape how structural information from a face is processed. With this grant, the researchers focus on one such process -- language -- by exploring the idea that emotion words (implicitly or explicitly) serve as an internal context to constrain the meaning of a face during an instance of emotion perception. A series of six studies will be conducted using a technique known as semantic satiation to temporarily render the meaning of an emotion word inaccessible to assess the impact of word inaccessibility on people's ability to perceive emotion in another person's face. Furthermore, three potential mechanisms by which language might influences emotion perception will be examined. Language may help to resolve competing "perceptual hypotheses" that arise from a structural analysis of the face, particularly when other contextual information fails to do so, or when such information is absent altogether (the categorization hypothesis). Second, it is possible that emotion words may influence how people sample and process the sensory information in a visual array (a face) to construct an emotional percept (the sensory sampling hypothesis). A third, perhaps more intriguing possibility, is that language dynamically reconfigures how structural information from the face is processed; when a word comes to mind, it may be associated with a reactivation (or simulation) of specific sensory information previous paired with the word, which then contributes to how incoming sensory information from a face is processed (the sensory inference hypothesis). From a scientific standpoint, language-as-context framework applies the Linguistic Relativity debate to the question of how far down into perception language can reach. From a practical standpoint, these studies will show that the emotions you see in others, and therefore your expectations for their behavior, are influenced by what you know about emotion (especially the language that you speak). If language intrinsically shapes the emotion perceived in other people, then acquisition and elaboration of linguistic categories may influence people's perceptual capacities. It may well be the case that people can be taught to become better emotion perceivers, and hence, better communicators.