Browsing by Person "Phillips, L. H."

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Processing orientation and Emotion Recognition
(American Psychological Association, 2012-02) Martin, Douglas; Slessor, G.; Allen, R.; Phillips, L. H.; Darling, Stephen
There is evidence that some emotional expressions are characterised by diagnostic cues from individual face features. For example, an upturned mouth is indicative of happiness, while a furrowed brow is associated with anger. The current investigation explored whether motivating people to perceive stimuli in a local (i.e., feature-based) rather than global (i.e., holistic) processing orientation was advantageous for recognising emotional facial expressions. Participants classified emotional faces while primed with local and global processing orientations, via a Navon-letters task. Contrary to previous findings for identity recognition, the current findings are indicative of a modest advantage for face emotion recognition under conditions of local processing orientation. When primed with a local processing orientation, participants performed significantly better on an emotion recognition task than when they were primed with a global processing orientation. The impacts of this finding for theories of emotion recognition and face processing are considered.