Visuomotor states of an observer influence person perception: The critical role of emotion

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A traditional view within Psychology has been that perceptual processes, such as seeing, hearing and smelling, are separate to action processes such as walking or picking up an object. Our work, along with other recent studies, has increasingly shown that in fact perceptual processes such as vision are intimately linked with actions, and that this is a bi-directional relationship. In one direction, visual information is automatically converted into action, even if a person has no intentions to act. For example, when viewing an object such as a coffee cup, the action of grasping the cup is activated, even though no overt action is observed (e.g., Tucker & Ellis, 1998). Even more strikingly, when observing another person act, such as kicking a soccer ball, similar action systems become covertly active in the observer, as if they were doing the same action. In the opposite direction, action states of the body can feedback on to perceptual processes, influencing how we perceive and understand the world around us (e.g., Bach & Tipper, 2007). For example, we have a better understanding of a coffee cup, because the appropriate actions become active, and we better understand other people because via simulation of their actions we quite literally put ourselves in to their current body states. We propose to test the novel hypothesis that emotion can be critical to these latter processes. That is, body states influence perceptual processes in many situations, but only if the body state evokes an emotional reaction. For example, we have shown that facilitated visual-motor processing while viewing another person can change how we perceive that person. Thus, if it is easier to identify a person while they are doing a particular action, such as kicking a ball, we start to believe they are particularly good at that action, and in this example would be assessed as an athletic person. Critically there is no property of the viewed person that reflects athletic ability, rather the vision-action fluency in the observer is misattributed to the viewed person. However our new idea is that these person misattribution effects are only produced when the more fluent vision-motor processes trigger positive emotional reactions in the observer. We have employed a technique to record the emotional reactions of a person on-line during such tasks to test our ideas. That is, we can record from the face muscles of a person, where it has been discovered that during more positive states the zygomaticus cheek muscle associated with smiling becomes more active, while during less positive emotional states the corrugator brow muscle associated with frowning becomes more active. The prediction is that only individuals who produce positive and negative reactions during vision-action processes will show effects of motor processing on their perception of objects and other people. A range of experiments will be undertaken to test this idea; these will examine perceptual judgments of people (such as trust), as well as examining whether our methods will be of value for studies of unconscious memory processes. A potential spin-off from this research is the use of such techniques to measure consumers' reactions to new products. Rather than employing the typical focus group techniques where individuals have to explicitly discuss their feelings, implicit measures can detect emotional reactions without requiring such complex and artificial introspective processes. A further spin off may be in terms of clinical psychology. For example, in depression or autism impaired emotional processes may block the usual effects of body/motor states on perceptual interpretations and learning.