Autosuggestion and mental imagery bias the perception of social emotions

Cognitive processes that modulate social emotion perception are of pivotal interest for psychological and clinical research. Autosuggestion and mental imagery are two candidate processes for such a modulation, however, their precise effects on social emotion perception remain uncertain. Here, we investigated how autosuggestion and mental imagery, employed during an adaptation period, influence the subsequent perception of facial emotions, and to which extent. Separate cohorts of participants took part in five experiments, where they either mentally affirmed (autosuggested; Experiments 1a and 1b) or imagined (Experiment 2) that a neutral face would be expressing a specific emotion (happy or sad). Subsequent facial emotion perception was then assessed by calculating points of subjective equality (PSEs) along a happiness-sadness continuum. Our results show that both autosuggestion and mental imagery induce a bias towards perceiving facial emotions in the direction of the desired emotion, with larger Bayes factors supporting autosuggestion. Experiment 3 confirmed the absence of effects when emotional words were presented together with a neutral face, suggesting a limited role of response bias in driving this effect. Finally, experiment 4 validated the experimental setup by demonstrating standard contrastive aftereffects when participants were adapted to actual, physical emotional faces. Together, our findings provide an initial step towards understanding the potential of intentional cognitive processes to modulate social emotions, specifically by biasing emotional face perception. With comparable effect sizes observed for both autosuggestion and mental imagery, both strategies show promise for self-directed interventions. Their practical applicability may vary due to individual responses, preferred cognitive strategies, and potential overlaps in underlying cognitive mechanisms.