Martin, DouglasSlessor, G.Allen, R.Phillips, L. H.Darling, Stephen2018-06-292018-06-292012-02Martin, D., Slessor, G., Allen, R., Phillips, L.H. and Darling, S. (2012) ‘Processing orientation and emotion recognition.’, Emotion, 12(1), pp. 39–43. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024775.1528-3542http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0024775https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/2475There 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.39-43RecognitionFace ProcessingProcessing OrientationSocial Cognitionarticlehttp://10.1037/a0024775