Emotional state and the use of stimulus dimensions in judgment

Previous studies have demonstrated that, when they are emotional, individuals are more likely to attend to emotional stimuli. However, such work has not established that individuals attend to the emotional dimensions of complex stimuli or that such changes in focus of attention judgments. In the present experiments a multidimensional scaling analysis was used to assess the weights that happy, sad, and neutral-emotion participants gave to emotional and nonemotional dimensions of face stimuli in judgments of similarity. Compared to neutral-emotion participants, those in emotional states gave more weight to the emotional dimension of the faces, less weight to other face dimensions, and rated pairs of faces that expressed the same emotion as more similar. Emotion-congruent dimension use was also observed in one experiment. Results are discussed with respect to emotional response categories (P.M. Niedenthal & J.B. Halberstadt, 1995), the tendency for stimuli to cohere as categories on the basis of the emotional response they elicit in the perceiver.