Emotion perception from a componential perspective.

The common conceptual understanding of emotion is that they are multi-componential, including subjective feelings, appraisals, psychophysiological activation, action tendencies, and motor expressions. Emotion perception, however, has traditionally been studied in terms of emotion labels, such as "happy", which do not clearly indicate whether one, some, or all emotion components are perceived. We examine whether emotion percepts are multi-componential and extend previous research by using more ecologically valid, dynamic, and multimodal stimuli and an alternative response measure. The results demonstrate that observers can reliably infer multiple types of information (subjective feelings, appraisals, action tendencies, and social messages) from complex emotion expressions. Furthermore, this finding appears to be robust to changes in response items. The results are discussed in light of their implications for research on emotion perception.

The Joint Contribution of Activation and Inhibition in Moderating Carryover Effects of Anger on Social Judgment.

Carryover effects of emotions that lead to biases in social judgments are commonly observed. We suggest that such effects may be influenced by the ability to engage or disengage attention from emotional stimuli. We assessed the ability to activate and inhibit attention to anger stimuli, experimentally induced anger in a demanding task, and measured social judgment toward an ambiguous target. Results show that higher activation and higher inhibition of anger-related information predicted more biased evaluations of the ambiguous target when individuals were experiencing anger, but not in an emotionally neutral condition. Interestingly, the effect of activation and inhibition in the anger condition emerged only when such variables were entered simultaneously in the regression model, indicating that they had an additive effect in predicting carryover effects of anger on social judgement. Results are consistent with a cooperative suppression effect (Conger, 1974) of activation and inhibition and may be explained by either an increased accessibility of anger-related cues leading to more biased social judgments, or by an instance in which being good at engaging in and disengaging attention from emotional cues might have depleted participants' resources making carryover effects of anger more likely to occur. Ultimately, the finding highlight that individual differences in attentional processes are important moderators for carryover effects of emotions.

Levels of valence.

The distinction between the positive and the negative is fundamental in our emotional life. In appraisal theories, in particular in the component process model of emotion (Scherer, 1984, 2010), qualitatively different types of valence are proposed based on appraisals of (un)pleasantness, goal obstructiveness/conduciveness, low or high power, self-(in)congruence, and moral badness/goodness. This multifaceted conceptualization of valence is highly compatible with the frequent observation of mixed feelings in real life. However, it seems to contradict the one-dimensional conceptualization of valence often encountered in psychological theories, and the notion of valence as a common currency used to explain choice behavior. Here, we propose a framework to integrate the seemingly disparate conceptualizations of multifaceted valence and one-dimensional valence by suggesting that valence should be conceived at different levels, micro and macro. Micro-valences correspond to qualitatively different types of evaluations, potentially resulting in mixed feelings, whereas one-dimensional macro-valence corresponds to an integrative "common currency" to compare alternatives for choices. We propose that conceptualizing levels of valence may focus research attention on the mechanisms that relate valence at one level (micro) to valence at another level (macro), leading to new hypotheses, and addressing various concerns that have been raised about the valence concept, such as the valence-emotion relation.