Emotional Influences on Perception

The effect of emotion on perception has been a topic of interest through much of the history of psychological thought. The notion that what we see is influenced by our internal emotional and motivational states is appealing to those inclined to view aspects of the mind as interconnected even at the earliest information-processing stages. Although accumulated evidence demonstrates that emotion affects the result of perceptual processing—that is, perceptual awareness—questions remain debated and unresolved regarding the precise processing stages at which emotion exerts its influence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, pioneering work by Jerome Bruner and colleagues inspired what became known as the “New Look” movement, a loosely knit effort among psychologists to reveal contributions of emotion, knowledge, personality, and motivation to perception. In one of their classic studies, children were asked to adjust the size of a patch of light so that it matched the size of either various nearby coins or size-matched cardboard disks. The children's errors were greater when estimating the sizes of coins than cardboard disks, a pattern particularly evident among the poorer than more wealthy children. The researchers concluded that perception is influenced by the value accorded to aspects of the environment, and they made the rallying argument that motivational factors need to be considered to understand perception in the real world. Two ideas that emerged from this movement were those of perceptual defense and perceptual vigilance, which referred to the peculiar manner in which people appeared to exhibit, respectively, impaired or enhanced perception of taboo or emotional stimuli (for example, worse or better recognition of such stimuli, relative to neutral stimuli, in noisy displays). Notably, such ideas—proposed before the maturation of information-processing approaches to perception, which involved differentiation and identification of interacting perceptual stages—seemed to contain within them an insurmountable paradox: How could emotional stimuli gain distinctive perceptual status when the act of prioritizing them necessitated that their emotional significance had already been perceived?

Modern research has at least partly resolved this dilemma, demonstrating that perceptual awareness reflects the output of many processing stages, with contributions from neural regions distributed throughout the brain. Thus, there are many opportunities for the emotional significance of sensory information to be registered before awareness. The amygdala, a neural structure heavily implicated in [Page 391]emotional processing, appears to receive some sensory inputs that bypass cortical areas associated with attention and awareness—which may explain findings that it responds even to emotional stimuli that people can't report. Furthermore, while this structure receives input from multiple brain areas, it also projects back reciprocally even to early neural processing regions—in the case of vision, as far back as the primary visual cortex. Such feedback connections may be important mechanisms underlying the enhanced activity, as revealed through neuroimaging, in vision-related brain areas in response to emotional, relative to non-emotional, stimuli. For example, emotionally expressive faces have been found to elicit more vigorous activity in a face-selective region of the temporal lobe (i.e., the fusiform face area, or FFA) than do neutral faces, and they have also been found to elicit increased amplitude of event-related potential (ERP) components as early as the P1 component, which peaks a mere 100-ms after stimulus onset. This entry describes the enhanced perception of emotional stimuli, effects of emotion on early perceptual processing, subliminal effects of emotional stimuli, questions about the function of preferential attention to emotional stimuli, and the influence of emotional states.

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