Negative affect interacts with perceptual affective biases.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Affective Science
• Psychology

Background:

• Affective biases in interpreting facial expressions are key in mood and anxiety disorders.
• Adaptation paradigms can differentiate perceptual from decisional biases.
• Previous studies have not applied adaptation paradigms to emotional biases in affective disorders.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if affective biases in facial emotion perception stem from perceptual or decisional processes.
• To examine how individual differences in negative affect modulate these biases.

Main Methods:

• Eighty participants performed emotion and identity discrimination tasks pre- and post-adaptation.
• Judgments of morphed faces and identities were followed by confidence ratings.
• Point of Subjective Equality (PSE) and peak uncertainty shifts were analyzed using logistic and Gaussian functions.

Main Results:

• Adaptation induced repulsive aftereffects, biasing perception away from the adapted emotion (e.g., happy faces biased perception toward sadness).
• Correlated shifts in PSE and uncertainty indicated perceptual, not decisional, origins of the bias.
• Higher negative affect correlated with stronger perceptual biases toward sadness.

Conclusions:

• Negative affect modulates low-level perceptual encoding of emotional expressions.
• Findings support cognitive neuropsychological models where early perceptual biases are targeted.
• Perceptual encoding is highlighted as a potential mechanism in mood and anxiety disorders.