Multilateral studies of cognitive process of emotion

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We have demonstrated that the structure of emotional facial expression recognition can be represent as a circumplex in the two-dimensional psychological space, consisting of valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and the level of arousal. One of the purpose of this study was to confirm the results of our previous experiments, investigating whether or not the structure of emotion space would maintain in addition to facial expressions, emotional words and vocal expression recognition. This study also investigated at finding out what sequence recognition of each emotion. The results confirmed robustness of the two-dimensional structure of recognition of emotional expressions and words. The results also revealed that any emotional stimulus regardless of whether it is an facial and a vocal expressions or an emotional word is recognized heuristically and simply either as a positive emotion or some other emotion (including a negative one) at the early stage. This result suggested a poasibility that those other emotions including negative ones would be differentiated into more specific emotion later. It is also suggested another possibility that positive emotions might not be so clearly differentiated as negative ones, but instead remain undifferentiated. The nature of positive emotion showed a sharp contrast with that of negative ones. The results of this study may be considered to suggest a possibility that positive emotions and negative ones are working on qualitatively different systems. We think that these processes of differentiation of an emotional expression were reflected the evolutional process of the emotion.