PURPOSE: The current study aimed to investigate whether valence concept plays a role in the formation of facial valence-perception and/or emotion-perception, and how valence concept affects the formation of a specific emotion (e.g. to distinguish which emotion it is rather than to distinguish its valence).
METHODS: E1 adopted a sematic satiation technique (repeated same word for 30 times) to manipulate participants’ availability of valence concept before making a facial approachment judgment. E2 combined semantic satiation with priming technique. Participants repeated (negative, positive or neutral) words before seeing two successive emotional (angry, sad or disgustful) faces. There were three priming conditions, i.e., semantic priming (same emotion with different identity), response priming (same identity with different emotion), perceptual priming (both were same) and baseline (both were different). E2 used an implicit emotion task where participants were required to judge the eye distances between the two faces. E3 used an explicit task by requiring participants to judge whether the emotions of the two faces were same.
RESULTS: E1 revealed no main effect of word satiation and no significant interactions, ps>.05 (n=31). The effects of response priming and sematic priming were not significant (ps>.05) in E2. However, the effect of perceptual priming was significant, F (2, 18) =6.97, p=.03. RTs were longer in the negative word repetition than in the neutral word repetition (p=.06) with no such an effect for the positive word repetition (p=.55). The E2 effect disappeared in E3.
CONCLUSIONS: Though top-down valence concept is not a requisite for valence perception, it contributes to the formation of specific emotional perception at encoding rather than semantic or response stage. This effect was asymmetrical and observed only with negative (but not positive) concept satiation. Meanwhile, the association between valence concept and emotion perception occurred only in an implicit, but not explicit, facial emotion task.