The Heart's Eye. Emotional Influences in Perception and Attention

285 Pages·1994·4.114 MB·English

by  Paula M. Niedenthal and Shinobu Kitayama (Eds.)

The
Heart's
Eye
Emotional Influences in
Perception and Attention
Edited by
Paula M. Niedenthal
Department of Psychology
Indiana university
Bloomington, Indiana
Shinobu Kitayama
Department of Psychology
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon
and
Kyoto University
Kyoto, ]apan
Academic Press
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Copyright © 1994 by ACADEMIC PRESS, INC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data
The heart's eye : emotional influences in perception and attention /
edited by Paula M. Niedenthal, Shinobu Kitayama.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-12-410560-2
1. Emotions. 2. Perception. 3. Attention. I. Niedenthal, Paula
M. II. Kitayama, Shinobu.
BF531.H378 1994
152.4-dc20 93-23395
CIP
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
94 95 96 97 98 99 BC 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For our parents, Morris and Corrine Niedenthal,
and Ryoyu and Hideko Kitayama
Contributors
Numbers in parentheses indicate the pages on which the authors' contributions begin.
Jerome Bruner (269), New York University, New York City, New York 10012
Douglas Derryberry (167), Department of Psychology, Oregon State Univer-
sity Corvallis, Oregon 97331
Christine Madeleine Du Bois (23), The )ohns Hopkins University Baltimore,
Maryland 21217
Howard Egeth (245), Department of Psychology The (ohns Hopkins Univer-
sity, Baltimore, Maryland 21218
Russell H. Fazio (197), Department of Psychology Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana 47405
Anthony G. Greenwald (67), Department of Psychology, University of Wash-
ington, Seattle, Washington 98195
xi
xii Contributors
Christine H. Hansen (217), Department of Psychology, Oakland University,
Rochester, Michigan 48309
Ranald D. Hansen (217), Department of Psychology, Oakland University,
Rochester, Michigan 48309
Susan Howard (41), Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eu-
gene, Oregon 97403
Marcia K. Johnson (145), Department of Psychology, Princeton University,
Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Douglas E. Jones (87), Department of Psychology, The Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity, Baltimore, Maryland 21218
Shinobu Kitaya ma (1,41), Department of Psychology, University of Oregon,
Eugene, Oregon 97403, and Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
Mark R. Klinger (67), Department of Psychology, University of Arkansas,
Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701
Paula M. Niedenthal (1, 87), Department of Psychology, Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana 47405
Martha C. Powell (197), Department of Psychology, University of Colorado,
Boulder, Colorado 80309
Felicia Pratto (115), Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stan-
ford, California 94305
David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen (197), Department of Psychology, University of
Alabama, TUscaloosa, Alabama 35487
Marc B. Setterlund (87), Department of Psychology, Concordia College,
Moorhead, Minnesota 56560
Don M. Tucker (167), Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eu-
gene, Oregon 97403
Israel Waynbaum1 (23), Paris, France
Carolyn Weisz (145), Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Prince-
ton, New Jersey 08544
R. B. Zajonc (17), Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, Michigan 48109
1
Deceased.
Preface
The editors of this volume once informally interviewed people about the
accuracy of their perception and found that most people admitted that there
had been occasions on which their eyes seemed to fail them. While on
some of these occasions people were exposed to well-known perceptual
illusions (e.g., demonstrated in a psychology class), on many other occa-
sions the perceiver was experiencing a strong emotion. Fear was a predomi-
nant emotion in people's stories about distorted perception. Two individuals
reported that they thought they had seen a bear (during a fearful state)
when, in fact, they saw a small dog in one incident, and a normal-sized man
in the other. Love was also a frequently mentioned emotion, with both
subjective qualities (e.g., attractiveness) and objective qualities (e.g., hair
and eye color) being subject to perceptual distortion during strong emotion.
As these examples imply, the possibility that emotions mediate perception
in an early and fundamental way is important, not only to basic models of
perception and attention, but also for specific concerns in psychology, such
as eyewitness testimony, detection of deceit, and stereotyping.
xiii
xiv Preface
The chapters contained in this volume all address the possibility that
affect exerts early influences in the processes that are involved in transform-
ing sensations into internal representations of words and objects. The chap-
ters that compose the first section of the volume focus on the possibility
that emotions influence automatic processes in perception. The chapters by
Waynbaum, Klinger and Greenwald, Pratto, and Niedenthal and colleagues
focus specifically on visual perception. Kitayama also reports the results of
experiments on auditory perception. Chapters in this section discuss wheth-
er emotion alters perceptual thresholds for certain types of stimuli, how the
emotional content and emotional tone of spoken communication interact,
and how much cognitive processing is required for perceivers to make judg-
ments about the affective meaning of visual stimuli.
The chapters that compose the second section examine the influences of
emotional state, as well as the affective connotation of stimulus events, in
processes of visual attention. This section is noteworthy in that the chapters
report research examining the processing of pictures (attitude objects),
words, human faces, and spatial location. Chapters in this section discuss
whether affect influences the direction and breadth of attention, and wheth-
er individuals allocate attention to positive and negative stimuli with equal
probability and efficiency. Each of the two sections closes with a discussion
authored by an expert in the field of perception and attention. We believe
that the volume takes psychology as a field some distance in answering two
major questions: Does emotion play an important and distinctive role in
low-level cognitive processes? And, finally, who cares if it does?
We have many people to thank for their roles in producing this volume.
We thank Robert Zajonc for fielding our occasional frantic phone calls,
for suggesting that the Waynbaum chapter be translated from the French
for publication in our book, for evaluating the English translation, and for
agreeing to write an introduction to the chapter at the last possible minute.
Christine M. Du Bois was the competent and sensitive translator of the
Waynbaum chapter. She put far more effort into understanding the terminol-
ogy of Waynbaum's time than we could ever have hoped.
We also thank our colleagues and students at The lohns Hopkins Univer-
sity, Indiana University, and the University of Oregon for their feedback,
criticism, advice, and encouragement. These people include Asher Cohen,
Howard Egeth, Russell Fazio, Igor Gavanski, Jamin Halberstadt, Robert Peter-
son, Michael Posner, Myron Rothbart, and Marc Setterlund.
Howard Egeth suggested the title of this book, and we thank him for it.
Finally, we thank several funding agencies for support of the research we
report in our respective chapters and for support of the preparation of the
book. These include National Science Foundation Grants BNS-8919755 and
DBS-921019 and National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH44811 to
Paula M. Niedenthal, and NSF Grant BNS-901054 and NIMH Grant MH50117
to Shinobu Kitayama.
Introduction
Shinobu Kitayama
University of Oregon and Kyoto University
Paula M. Niedenthal
Indiana University
One of us once taught an undergraduate psychology course in which we
discussed the ideas of the New Look in perception. As Bruner so eloquently
explains in the concluding chapter of this volume, the overarching goal of
the New Look was to address the possibility that emotional states and
emotional traits influence basic processes of attention and perception. After
teaching this class on the New Look, we ran into a colleague, a perception
and attention researcher, and told him, enthusiastically, that the topic of our
just-completed lecture was the New Look in perception. The colleague
looked quizzical and asked, "What is the New Look in perception?"
The New Look in the 1950s
The New Look in perception, a set of loosely related programs of percep-
tion research conducted in the 1940s and 1950s, was represented by a
number of researchers who argued that the emotional meaning of a stimu-
The Heart's Eye Emotional Influences in Perception and Attention
Copyright © 1994 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved 1
2 Shinobu Kitayama and Paula M. Niedenthal
lus could be responded to (as indicated by an emotional reaction in the
perceiver) before the stimulus was consciously perceived, and that the reac-
tion could determine the content or form of the resulting conscious percept.
For example, because of their value, positive stimuli—or stimuli previously
associated with reward—were hypothesized to be dominant or "figurai" in
the perceptual field (Schäfer & Murphy, 1943; Jackson, 1954; Smith &
Hochberg, 1954). The physical attributes of positive or valued stimuli were
also proposed to be enhanced (e.g., larger, brighter, louder), compared to
those of negative stimuli, in conscious perception (e.g., Bruner & Goodman,
1947); negative information was thought to be perceptually defended
against under many conditions (Bruner & Postman, 1947; McGinnies, 1949).
Although the ideas were intriguing and clearly important, theoretical and
empirical problems prevented the work conducted during the New Look
from having a significant impact on theories of perception. One problem was
that models of perception at the time regarded perception as an all-or-none
phenomenon and, thus, did not allow for the possibility that conscious
perception may be a final product of distinct stages of processing or mental
operations performed on an impinging stimulus. Not surprisingly, there was
little place for the involvement of emotional reactions in perception and
virtually no place for the idea of nonconscious (or preattentive) processing
prior to the resolution of a conscious percept. Another problem was that
empirical and quantitative methods were not yet sophisticated enough to
address serious methodological criticisms. For example, many of the find-
ings in this literature were interprétable in terms of biases in verbal or motor
responses. Thus, they were dismissed as irrelevant in addressing perceptual
processes. Finally, some of the "New Lookers" were grounded in psycho-
analytic theory. Thus, the question "Does emotion influence perception?"
was sometimes posed as a question of unconscious, and largely sexual,
motivation: "Do unconscious, sexual drives elicited by evocative stimuli
distort conscious perception?" This focus, anathema to many experimental-
ists, necessarily limited the impact of the New Look on theories of percep-
tion and attention.
Cognition without Emotion
The New Look of the 1950s was lost in the subsequent "cognitive revolu-
tion," as rather dramatically illustrated by our conversation with a percep-
tion researcher-colleague. The core agendas of the New Look simply could
not compete with the ones compelled by the Zeitgeist. The cognitive project
was premised on an image of the person as a rational actor, resembling a
serial computer, that is capable of receiving stimuli, analyzing, comprehend-
ing them, and acting according to the ensuing cognitive representation of
those stimuli. With this emphasis on the rational, systematic, or logically
Introduction 3
permissible computations that constitute cognitive processing, consider-
able progress was achieved in our understanding of, for example, learning
and memory of verbal, referential communications such as words and de-
scriptive sentences. In a similar vein, social psychologists learned a great
deal about, for instance, how specific pieces of information about a person
are encoded and integrated to yield a coherent personality impression or to
draw attributional inferences.
If the metaphor of the person as computerlike, systematic information
processor helped define certain "core" problems such as learning, memory,
impression formation, and attribution, and advance the scientific knowledge
in those areas, it also veiled or impeded others. For the present purposes, it
is noteworthy that within the cognitive paradigm, emotion, motivation, or
whatever else relates to or results from the person's actual interaction with
the external environment, whether it be ecological, social, or cultural, repre-
sented no more than error variance. Emotion and motivation were regarded
as epiphenomena that inflate the variance in virtually every dependent mea-
sure, ranging from simple motor response to complex learning and were,
therefore, to be carefully controlled or otherwise to be partialled out of the
resulting data. No wonder emotion and motivation were effectively ousted
from the content domain of cognitive psychology.
The same enthusiasm to explain seemingly emotional or motivational
effects as a somewhat convoluted or otherwise trivial consequence or con-
comitant of systematic cognitive information processing was also evident in
social psychology. It was fashionable during the cognitive revolution to attri-
bute evidently motivational effects such as self-serving bias to cognitive
factors (e.g., Miller & Ross, 1975). Although the Zeitgeist produced a number
of fruitful insights and important empirical findings (e.g., Nisbett & Ross,
1980), it also effectively masked potentially powerful contributions of mo-
tivation or emotion, as eloquently pointed out by Zajonc (1980).
New Functionalism and the Role of Emotion
Times have changed. Emotion and motivation have come back to the
center stage of psychological inquiry. This trend is evident in every subarea
of psychology, including cognitive psychology (e.g., Bower, 1981), social psy-
chology (e.g., Clark & Fiske, 1982; Isen, 1984; Zajonc, 1980), neuroscience
(e.g., LeDoux, 1989), clinical psychology (Gotlib, McLachlan, & Katz, 1988;
MacLeod & Mathews, 1988), developmental psychology (Harris, 1989; Izard,
1993), and neuropsychology (Van Lancker, 1991).
One major catalyst for this change, we think, was an acute realization that
even though the processes of the mind can be described in terms of rational,
computerlike operations, the processes have nonetheless been shaped by
their effectiveness in adapting to the biological, ecological, social, and cul-