Subjective mood state and perception of emotion in chimeric faces

Levy, Heller, Banich, and Burton (1983) have shown that hemispheric activational, or arousal, style, as measured by direction and consistency of choice of the "happer face" on a free-viewing Chimeric Faces Test, is highly reliable and varies across individuals who otherwise presumably have similar cortical organization (e.g., right-handed college students). The current experiment asks whether such individual differences in hemispheric arousal style are moderated by long-term, in the sense of enduring, individual differences in mood, as measured by the Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaire. Like Levy et al.'s subjects, most of our subjects (126 right-handed college students) made most of their choices on the Chimeric Faces Test based on the emotional cue (the smile) positioned in the half of the face to the viewer's left, or left visual hemifield (LVH), whereas a small minority were equally consistent in making their choice based on the emotional cue positioned in the half of the face to the viewer's right, or right visual hemifield (RVH). Performance on the Chimeric Faces Test, however, proved to be unrelated to scores on the POMS questionnaire. This suggests that hemispheric arousal style, as indexed by the Chimeric Faces Test, is robust enough, for a population of normal right-handers, to transcend any differences in mood as measured by the POMS questionnaire.