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。这一事实使许多人认为，情绪感知是从另一个人的脸上的信息，就像阅读一页上的文字。然而，研究表明，当参与者将恐惧的面部描述与愤怒体验相关的上下文信息配对时，有60%-75%的参与者将其错误地标记为“愤怒”。 语境在情绪感知中起着重要的作用。 语境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。 有了这笔资助，研究人员将重点放在其中一个过程--语言--上，探索情感词语（隐含或显式）作为内部上下文来约束情感感知过程中面孔的含义的想法。 一系列的六项研究将使用一种称为语义饱和的技术来暂时使情感词的含义无法访问，以评估词的不可访问性对人们感知他人面部情感的能力的影响。此外，三个潜在的机制，语言可能会影响情绪感知将被检查。语言可能有助于解决从面部结构分析中产生的相互竞争的“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不存在时（分类假设）。第二，情感词可能会影响人们如何在视觉阵列（面部）中采样和处理感官信息以构建情感感知（感官采样假设）。第三种可能性，也许更有趣，是语言动态地重新配置了来自面部的结构信息的处理方式;当一个词出现在脑海中时，它可能与先前与该词配对的特定感官信息的重新激活（或模拟）有关，然后有助于如何处理来自面部的传入感官信息（感官推理假设）。 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到语言能到达感知的程度。 从实践的角度来看，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（特别是你所说的语言）的影响。如果说语言在本质上塑造了人们感知到的情感，那么语言范畴的习得和阐述可能会影响人们的感知能力。很可能人们可以被教导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.